NASA’s MMS Mission creates Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of GPS signal

NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission on 5 November 2016 set the Guinness world record for highest altitude fix of a Global Positioning System (GPS) signal at 70000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.

Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission successfully completed commissioning activities on 1 September 2015 and is now in full science mode.

About Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission
• NASA’s MMS mission is an unmanned space mission to study the Earth’s magnetosphere, using four identical satellites flying in a tetrahedral or pyramid formation.
• It was launched in March 2015 with an aim to map magnetic reconnection, a process that occurs as the sun and Earth’s magnetic fields interact.
• It was launched to understand the causes of magnetic reconnection for understanding phenomena of auroras on Earth, flares on surface of sun, and areas surrounding black holes.
• It was designed to gather information about the microphysics of energetic particle acceleration and turbulence, processes that occur in many astrophysical plasmas.
• When these four satellites were closest to Earth, they moved up to 35405 km/hour, making them the fastest known operational use of a GPS receiver.
• These satellites operated in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth and incorporated GPS measurements into their precise tracking systems.
• Earlier in 2016, MMS achieved the closest flying separation of a multi-spacecraft formation with only 7.2 km between the four satellites.
• The mission in its first year of prime mission gave scientists the new insight into Earth’s magnetosphere.