NASA Administrator and Media to See MMS Mission Progress

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had a firsthand look at work being done on the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft during a visit to the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Monday, May 12, 2014. Bolden visited Goddard's Integration and Test Facility where the four MMS spacecraft are undergoing testing. The spacecraft were in a rare four-stack arrangement inside a clean room after completing vibration testing. The clean room itself was temporarily altered to allow a close-up view of the approximate 20-foot high collection of four observatories in their launch configuration. In addition to Bolden, MMS project personnel were available to answer questions about the mission, ground testing and preps for launch. During its two-year mission, MMS will explore the mystery of how magnetic fields around Earth connect and disconnect, explosively releasing energy — a process known as magnetic reconnection. The four MMS spacecraft will provide the first three-dimensional views of this fundamental process that occurs throughout our universe.