When NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on Thursday, March 12, it delivered a four-spacecraft experiment into Earth orbit that will study an important phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. Aboard each of those spacecraft is an Energetic Ion Spectrometer (EIS) instrument, designed and built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

These two infrared images of C/2013 (Comet Siding Spring) were taken by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Oct. 19, 2014. Comet Siding Spring — an Oort Cloud comet that may contain material from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago — was making its first voyage through the inner solar system. CRISM and many other instruments and spacecraft combined to provide an unprecedented data set for an Oort Cloud comet.