Inside collisionless space plasmas at the electron scale with the MMS mission

Séminaire IPAG de Olivier Le Contel (LPP), jeudi 20 mai 2021, 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The MMS (Magnetospheric Multi-Scale) mission was launched on March 12th 2015 by an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Like the European Cluster mission, MMS consists of four identically instrumented spacecraft which measure particles, electric and magnetic fields in the Earth’s magnetized environment. However, while the Cluster mission has mainly investigated the plasma processes at the fluid and ion scale, MMS was designed to address these processes at the electron dynamics scale. The main objective of the mission is the understanding of the magnetic reconnection, a fundamental physical process which is able to transfer magnetic energy to charged particles by heating and accelerating them. In this seminar, I will briefly review the instrument suite and the measurement performances of the mission. Then I will present various recent results related to the reconnection process, collisionless shocks, plasma turbulence and transport with a particular attention to wave/particle interactions and non linear coherent structures.