A single sounding rocket mission generates a lot of scientific data. Two even more. And then imagine the amount of data one could get from twelve missions.
That is the basic idea behind the Grand Challenge Initiative. Instead of investigating the same geophysical phenomenon on each own, scientists combine all their launch vehicles and ground-based instrumentation in to one large project sharing the scientific data amongst them.
The first grand challenge was named the «Cusp Project»; twelve sounding rockets from Norway, Japan and USA were combined in to one large research mission investigating the highly interesting cusp region of Earth’s magnetosphere.
A second challenge is on the way, named «Project Mesosphere / Lower Thermosphere», and it will be a larger project involving launch sites and observation sites all over the world.