Future Nanosat Mission: DRACO

Cartoon of the Magnetospheric Constellation Mission.

The Magnetopsheric Constellation mission will deploy 50 to 100 nanosats——these may be even smaller than smallsats——in the magnetosphere's tail, called the magnetotail. Also called DRACO, an acronym for Dynamic Response and Coupling Observatory, this mission will try to answer such scientific questions as:

• How does the magnetotail store and release energy?
• What processes control magnetotail structure and dynamics?
• How do the physical processes and regions couple over the hierarchy of scales?

DRACO, part of the Solar Terrestrial Probe Program, will explore the dynamics, responses,and connections within Earth's magnetotail during its two year lifetime.

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