Command and Data Handling for the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is the fourth mission of the Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP) program. The MMS mission, consisting of four identically instrumented spacecraft, will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma-physical process that taps the energy stored in a magnetic field and converts it — typically explosively — into heat and kinetic energy in the form of charged particle acceleration and largescale flows of matter.