[Source: NASA THEMIS Mission Home Page, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/mission/ ]
NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) aims to resolve one of the oldest mysteries in space physics, namely to determine what physical process in near-Earth space initiates the violent eruptions of the aurora that occur during substorms in the Earth's magnetosphere.
THEMIS is a 2-year mission consisting of 5 identical probes that will study the violent colorful eruptions of Auroras.
For the first time NASA will launch a constellation of five satellites to study substorms. The THEMIS probes will line up over North America once every four days. Over the mission’s two-year lifetime, the probes should be able to observe some 30 substorms.
THEMIS is the fifth medium-class mission under NASA's Explorer Program, which was conceived to provide frequent flight opportunities for world-class scientific investigations from space within the Heliophysics and Astrophysics science areas. The Explorers Program Office at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., manages this NASA-funded mission. The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory and Swales Aerospace, Beltsville, Md., built the THEMIS probes.
Group: Platform_Details
Entry_ID: THEMIS
Group: Platform_Identification
Platform_Category: Solar/Space Observation Satellites
Platform_Series_or_Entity: NASA Medium Class Explorers (MIDEX)
Short_Name: THEMIS
Long_Name: Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms
End_Group
Group: Platform_Associated_Instruments
Short_Name: THEMIS-SST
Short_Name: THEMIS-ESA
Short_Name: THEMIS-FGM
Short_Name: THEMIS-EFI
Short_Name: SCM
End_Group
Group: Orbit
Orbit_Type: HEO > Highly Elliptical Orbit
End_Group
Creation_Date: 2008-07-17
Online_Resourc : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/main
Online_Resourc : http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu
Online_Resourc : http://www.atk.com/Customer_Solutions_SpaceSystems/cs_ss_spacesys_ssp_ppcs-themis.as
Sample_Imag : http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/164405main_THEMIS-Spacecraft_bus2.jp
Group: Platform_Logistics
Launch_Date: 2007-02-17
Launch_Site: Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center, USA
Primary_Sponsor: USA/NASA
End_Group
End_Group (en)