Date: 16 Oct 2009
Depicts: The Cross-Scale and SCOPE concept of a multi-scale spacecraft configuration
Copyright: ESA Cross-Scale Science Study Team

In near-Earth space, the typical inter-spacecraft separation distance to sample three key spatial scales of fundamental physical processes is: a few kilometres for the electron scale, a few hundreds of kilometres for the ion scale and a few thousands of kilometres for the fluid scale.

In the optimum configuration of 12 spacecraft (7 Cross-Scale plus 5 SCOPE) each of the three spatial scales (indicated by the three coloured, nested tetrahedra in this image) would be sampled.