Speaker
Description
NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) has provided and continues to provide heretofore unimaginable insight into the kinetic machinery of the magnetic reconnection process. These successes are based on innovative combinations of extreme-precision observations of magnetic reconnection at the Earth’s magnetopause and inside the nightside magnetotail, with concurrent theoretical analyses and numerical modeling. For example, we now have a very good understanding of the physics of the central diffusion region even when reconnection occurs in conjunction with plasma turbulence. We are also advancing our knowledge of how the central electron diffusion region couples to its environment, from ion scales to very large scales – a critical multi-scale problem, and we do have an ever-growing insight into the reconnection rate
problem. This presentation will provide an overview of the new knowledge recent research has created, and it will discuss open questions, and possible follow-on avenues for investigations in near-Earth space and elsewhere in space- and astrophysical plasmas.
