How does an underscore in front of a variable in a cocoa objective-c class work?

If you use the underscore prefix for your ivars (which is nothing more than a common convention, but a useful one), then you need to do 1 extra thing so the auto-generated accessor (for the property) knows which ivar to use. Specifically, in your implementation file, your synthesize should look like this:

@synthesize missionName = _missionName;

More generically, this is:

@synthesize propertyName = _ivarName;

It's just a convention for readability, it doesn't do anything special to the compiler. You'll see people use it on private instance variables and method names. Apple actually recommends not using the underscore (if you're not being careful you could override something in your superclass), but you shouldn't feel bad about ignoring that advice. :)