Representatives from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were on hand April 5, 2014, for an outdoor "show and tell" event called the Mini Maker Faire. The event, which was held at Roosevelt Center Plaza in Greenbelt, attracted about 1,500 visitors.

Craig Tooley, project manager for NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, along with education specialists Troy Cline and Carolyn Ng, were on hand to discuss why the agency is launching MMS and what it will hopefully tell us about how magnetic fields connect and disconnect around Earth, explosively releasing energy - a process known as magnetic reconnection.

The MMS mission consists of four identical spacecraft that will provide the first three-dimensional views of this fundamental process that occurs throughout our universe.

Visitors had the opportunity to see a small-scale model of the MMS spacecraft, view a large LED screen showing the latest video clips of pre-launch activities taking shape in the Goddard MMS cleanroom and children constructed paper MMS spacecraft models using the new NASA bookmark activity.

Visitors also read about NASA's science, technology, engineering and math efforts for MMS on colorful, seven-foot tall banner stand displays.