NASA MMS Spacecraft Model

This spacecraft model was made with a vacuum formed shroud and laser cut ribbing. The individually stacked spacecraft were molded and cast. Thirty additional models were commissioned a few months after the original was made.

Click here for a pictorial of the spacecraft model build on Flickr.

More on the mission itself below.

From the NASA Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission  website: “The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is a Solar Terrestrial Probes mission comprising four identically instrumented spacecraft that will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of three fundamental plasma processes: magnetic reconnection, energetic particle acceleration, and turbulence. These processes occur in all astrophysical plasma systems but can be studied in situ only in our solar system and most efficiently only in Earth’s magnetosphere, where they control the dynamics of the geospace environment and play an important role in the processes known as ‘space weather.’”