The SCOPE mission

In order to open the new horizon of research in the plasma universe, SCOPE will perform formation flying multi-scale observations combined with high-time resolution electron detection and will enable data-based study on the key space plasma processes from the cross-scale coupling point of view. Key physics to be studied are magnetic reconnection under various conditions, shocks in space plasma, collisionless plasma mixing at the boundaries, and physics of current sheets embedded in complex magnetic geometries. The SCOPE mission is made up of the 5 spacecraft (s/c) formation put into the equatorial orbit with the apogee at 30Re (Re: earth radius). One of the s/c is a large mother ship which is equipped with a full suite of particle detector including ultra-high sampling cycle electron detector. Among other 4 small s/c one remains near (∼10 km) the mother ship and the s/c-pair will focus on wave-particle interaction utilizing inter-s/c communication. Others are used for wave-particle interaction study when the distance from the mother ship is small (∼100 km) and are used as the plasma monitors at ion-scales when the distance is larger (100-300 0km). There is lively on-going discussion on the SCOPE-M³ collaboration, which would certainly make the coverage over the scales of interest better and thus make the mission success to be attained at an even higher level.