[Reporter] In just a few hours NASA will launch a new mission that will send four spacecraft into the heart of magnetic storms around Earth tell us more about this mission and what we expect to learn from it is Dr. Michelle Thaller from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, thanks for joining us. [Thaller] Great to be here, thank you. [Reporter] You're getting ready to launch a new mission, tell us about it. [Thaller] Yes, tonight we are getting ready to launch the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), and here is a live feed from the Atlas-5 rocket, getting ready to launch at 10:44pm tonight and inside the nose cone of that rocket are four identical spacecraft. and the spacecraft are going to separate away from each other, and they all have very sensitive instruments on long booms and when these booms are extended each one these observatories are about the size of a football field, and they will fly in formation around the Earth. You can see here that are sort of a pyramid configuration they will actually fly to the exact place where these powerful magnetic storms are happening. [Reporter] How do these magnetic storms affect us on Earth? [Thaller] One of the things we are not really aware of is we live in a wonderful complex magnetic environment, the Sun has a powerful magnetic field and interacts with our Earth's magnetic field too. Sometimes the Sun actually streams off high energy particles and they bounce off our magnetic field but they cause the magnetic fields to bend and it can actually snap and reconfigure in a violent way, called magnetic reconnection, and this accelerates particles down toward the Earth that caused the northern lights. So, they are beautiful effects but also inconvenient like taking down power lines. and causing blackouts. So, here you see a beautiful display of northern lights. But there is a blackout going down underneath. So, there's some very intrinsic human reasons for understanding these magnetic storms much better. [Reporter] Why is it important to understand this phenomenon? [Thaller] Well not only here on Earth, but there are things driven by magnetic reconnection. Think about the Sun, the Sun is a wonderful but violent thing and there are storms on the Sun. There are violent activities called solar flares and these are driven by this effect called magnetic reconnection, you can see a solar flare happening right there. Incredible intense high energy radiation coming out of that. And farther away, objects like black holes, dead stars there are jets from right near the black hole that caused by the magnetic field at the disks around black holes, and these jets can be many trillions of miles across. What accelerates the particles so fast and so far is this magnetic reconnection. So understanding it near and far we are going to be looking at something wonderfully fundamental about the universe. [Reporter] What can we expect from this mission? [Thaller] Well, the mission will be launching tonight, and then it will go into orbit for over two years, and it will be studying the details of these magnetic storms. Eventually, that will lead to a much better understanding of how the Sun affects the Earth, space weather and we hope to actually have more of a predictive capability of being able to understand when these storms might be dangerous for the Earth and for our power grids, for satellites and even astronauts that go beyond the Earth's magnetic field. Destination like the Moon and Asteroids and Mars eventually. [Reporter] Where can we learn more about this mission? [Thaller] To learn about MMS and infact this entire fleet of spacecraft we have, study the interaction of the Sun and the magnetic fields of our planets go to www.nasa.gov/sunearth [Reporter] Great thanks for joining us. [Thaller] Thank You...