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NASA To Deploy Four Spacecraft To Study Magnetic Reconnection
Zothecula writes: NASA has released a video depicting the initial deployment of an undertaking designed to study a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection. "Reconnection happens when magnetic field lines explosively realign and release massive bursts of energy, while hurling particles out at nearly the speed of light in all directions. Magnetic reconnection powers eruptions on the sun and – closer to home – it triggers the flow of material and energy from interplanetary space into near-Earth space." The launch of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission will see four identical spacecraft deployed from a single Atlas V rocket, set to lift off from cape Canaveral, Florida, no earlier than March next year.
Magnetosphere-sensing satellites in a pyramid formation? That's gotta be some kind of Illuminati mind-control scheme!
The sun's magnetosphere? Why do I care about the launch vehicle? The reconnections power eruptions close to the earth too? How about we leave making shit up to Fox News and Timothy. How about give us a hint about what the experiment is measuring, where, and how it matters, instead of what fucking rocket they're using to launch it. Oh, and I don't care if the satellites are identical. That really doesn't matter.
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Ugh. Time to go.
"Reconnection happens when magnetic field lines explosively realign and release massive bursts of energy, while hurling particles out at nearly the speed of light in all directions. Magnetic reconnection powers eruptions on the sun and – closer to home – it triggers the flow of material and energy from interplanetary space into near-Earth space."
Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Peter Venkman: What?
Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.
In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.
I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
* It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
* It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://brickset.com/sets/theme-Space/subtheme-M-Tron
This is what I thought of when I read "NASA To Deploy Four Spacecraft To Study Magnetic Reconnection" :/
...this means further study can be carried out on the South Atlantic Anomaly which is a continuing risk to pretty much anything which crosses its boundaries (which Hubble and the ISS do an average of 3 times a day each)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Considering the terrible back luck all space agencies seem to have had with deploying tethers (getting stuck, snapping, etc) - they plan on deploying 4 per satellite? I hope there are contingency plans or someone really thought long and hard about possible failure modes and engineered around them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Technical part first:
MMS is essentially the 2.0 version of CLUSTER. CLUSTER is an ESA mission launched in 1996 first time with the first Ariane 5 and a big boom and the tears of a thousand scientists and engineers, second time in 2000 with two soyuz rockets). It has the standard space plasma physics payload, which is instruments that measure electric field, magentic field, electrons and protons. It has way better time resolution especially for electrons and protons (and some other less dramatic instrumental improvements) and also the formation will be tighter than CLUSTER, with the spacecraft flying 10km apart instead of 100-1000km. Although not very publicized since its a rather obscure scientifgic field it still is a fairly big mission with a budget at around a billion dollars. For comparison Rosetta was 2 billion and Curiosity about 5-6 IIRC. Formation flying is a rather spectacular achievement and as in the Rosetta case the full credit goes to those obscure and mysterious flight dynamics wizards.
Science stuff:
Basic science objective is to study magnetic reconnection in the magnetopause and the magnetotail. Rough summary is that those are the points where Earth's magnetic field lines break and reconnect to those of the interstellar (i.e. the Sun's) magnetic field. This allows solar wind particles to flow inside the magnetosphere of Earth. It also accelerates them and then they follow Earths magnetic field to the polar regions where you get nice auroras when they hit the atmosphere. It will also provide nice data on earth's bowshock and the magnetosheath that lies behind it. Those are very turbulent regions that form when the solar wind hits Earth's magnetosphere and deccelerates.
It is also very very important for plasma physics and turbulence in general since we rarely get nice measurements in those small scales. Simulations are really expensive mostly due to the range of scales involved and the complexity of reconnection physics and only this year it became barely feasible to run a full kinetic code with proper turbulence. In terms of lab experiments you are also really limited since lazers don't do turblulence and a tokamak in operation is not the friendliest enviroenment to stick probes into.
Regarding the question on fusion: Definately no, at least not directly. Magnetic reconnection is a very important topic for tokamaks as well but the plasma parameters are very different. However it will be valuable for fusion as much as it will be for all plasma physics in the sense that it will provide insights to a basic and rather ubiquitous process that we all tend to ignore since its just too complicated to stick in a code. I think it will have a way more direct impact in astrophysics though.
Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost).
The point is that it's not zero cost. Every penny of money "funded by the Fed" comes from your and my pockets - sometimes with a big multiplier - by paths that are not as obvious, but just as costly, as a tax bill.
The biggest one is inflation: If the Fed just prints money, it dilutes the rest of the money. Your wages go down (though the numbers don't change.) Got retirement savings? They go down, too. Your investments go down - but the numbers make it look like they wen't up, and the government taxes the fake "gain". Everything you buy gets more expensive.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way