NASA is on a mission to study what The Associated Press called "the explosive give-and-take of the Earth and sun's magnetic fields" and launched four identical spacecraft on Thursday to explore a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection.

The crowd at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station cheered as an unmanned Atlas rocket -- and the space agency's Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft -- took off into a the night sky punctually and without any incidents.

The four identical satellites perched atop the rocket will in a pyramid formation high around Earth, Reuters reported. Each is equipped with 25 sensors designed to record in split-second detail what happens when the planet's magnetic field lines break apart and reconnect.

Eventually, NASA researchers hope to produce three-dimensional maps of the events. The endeavor may help them better understand magnetic reconnection, a common yet poorly understood process throughout the universe.

Planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and other celestial objects all create magnetic fields, and when field lines snap apart and reconnect, charged particles are sent into space at some 186,000 miles per second -- nearly the speed of light. On the sun, meanwhile, magnetic reconnection unleashes solar flares, which are as powerful as 1 million nuclear bombs.

The science involved in NASA's project is complex, and the exploration comes at a price: The space agency is spending about $1.1 billion on the Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, effort.

Lead researcher Jim Burch from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said at a pre-launch press conference that he is optimistic about the mission's potential.

"The MMS mission will conduct a definitive experiment in space that will finally allow us to understand how magnetic reconnection works," he said.

And while space weather scientists hope that they, too, will benefit from the project's findings, Burch cautioned that the scope of the mission is limited.

"We're not setting out here to solve space weather," Burch said. "We're setting out to learn the fundamental features of magnetic reconnection because that's what drives space weather."

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