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Fast Plasma Instrument
News Items
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22 September 2006 -- Three Days and Twenty RFAs
On September 19-21, 2006 in Building 8 of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)
in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) Mission held its first
major review since selection in May 2005: the MDR/PNAR (Mission Definition Review/Pre-Non
Advocate Review). The MDR, a new review instituted by NASA that takes place at the end
of the first phase of mission development (Phase A Preliminary Analysis), covered the technical
aspects of the mission while the PNAR focused on management. Various Goddard Space Flight
Center Project leads, Southwest Research Center SMART personnel, and Instrument Suite
leads breezed through a daunting 800 slide PowerPoint package summarizing all aspects
of the mission for the review panel. When the dust cleared, the panel congratulated the
team for its outstanding performance and presented the team with about twenty minor RFAs
or Requests for Action to address before moving on to the next major review scheduled for
the end of this calendar year: Initial Confirmation Review.
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15 March 2006 -- The Sun Never Sets on MMS
On February 15-17, 2006, J Burch and B Gibson of the MMS/SMART Team at
Southwest Research Institute joined members of the SMART/FPI Team at Goddard SFC in Tokyo,
Japan to meet with representatives from the Japan Aerospace Meisei Electric Company
and the
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Meisei Electric Company will be contracted by SWRI to build the Dual Ion Spectrometers
(DIS) package for the MMS Fast Plasma Instrument. This meeting served to define and clarify the
statement of work for Meisei Electric Co. Toshifumi Mukai and Yoshifumi Saito of JAXA are the science leads
for the DIS. The GSFC FPI Team
leads the integration of the DIS with the rest of the Fast Plasma Instrument, including the Dual Electron
Spectrometers and the Instrument Data Processing Unit.
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1 January 2006 -- The Two Day Show
Reconnection took center-stage on the first two days, Monday December 5 and Tuesday
December 6, of the Fall 2005 American Geophysical Union Meeting
in San Francisco. The special session entitled "Magnetic Reconnection as a Universal
Process: The Laboratory, the Magnetosphere, and the Sun" featured presentations of
magnetospheric and solar observations, analytic and numerical studies, and controlled
laboratory experiments addressing the microscopic and macroscopic aspects of magnetic
reconnection and its consequences.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Fast Plasma Instrument team and other members of SMART
presented all instruments, orbital and operations strategy, theory and modeling, and
education/public outreach components of this exciting Earth-Sun System Division mission
to the community. The FPI poster on the right provides an example of the presentations in
this special session addressing not only our current state of knowledge of this universal
process, but also what the future holds...
Click here for a
PDF File
of the MMS/FPI abstract.
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16 August 2005 -- A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: GSFC's Heliospheric Physics Branch Gets
SPIFfy
After many years of planning, preparation and anticipation, the Heliospheric Physics Branch's
new Building 21 Space Physics Instrument Facility (SPIF) has opened for business. The
state-of-the art facility includes a class 1000 clean room for flight instrument assembly,
two large vacuum systems for instrument testing, a beam facility, supplies and testing
equipment, and a staff eager to advance space physics particle instrumentation well beyond
where it stands today...
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May 2005 -- Solving Magnetospheric Acceleration, Reconnection, and Turbulence (SMART) Selected
for the MMS Mission
Our SMART instrument payload for the MMS mission, led by J. L. Burch of Southwest
Research Institute (SwRI), was selected for development. The GSFC role is to develop
the Fast Plasma Instrument (FPI). Resolution of rapidly moving short length scale
features requires observations from closely-spaced platforms with a measurement cadence
less than 30 ms. The FPI exceeds this demanding requirement by acquiring full sky,
high-resolution (11deg) electron plasma velocity distributions every 25 ms. FPI also
delivers four full sky, medium-resolution (45deg) distributions every 6 ms, for
unprecedented access to electron scale dynamics within the reconnection diffusion region.
Data compression and burst memory management provide at least 16 minutes of high time
resolution data during each orbit of the four MMS spacecraft. Each spacecraft will
intelligently downlink the data sequences that contain the greatest amount of temporal
structure. For both electrons and ions, FPI will realize these specifications by means
of eight half-top-hat energy analyzers. Each analyzer has a 180-deg x 6-deg fan-shaped
field of view (FOV) aligned with the s/c spin axis, and is fitted with lateral FOV
deflection electrodes. The analyzers are packaged as four Dual Electron Spectrometers
and four Dual Ion Spectrometers on each spacecraft. When distributed properly around the
spacecraft, these packages provide an instantaneous full-sky view that is independent of
spacecraft spin rate. This approach makes available a very large instantaneous aperture for
plasma measurements at the high sensitivity required for short exposure measurements. FPI
is based on flight heritage from Cluster/PEACE, Geotail/LEP, Polar/Hydra, and Rosetta/IES.
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