Mission Name THEMIS: Time History of Events of Macroscale Interactions During Substorm THEMIS Mission Patch THEMIS Poster (2.9Mb) LASP Instruments THEMIS: Time History of Events of Macroscale Interactions During Substorm Principal Investigator: Robert Ergun Destination Varying Earth Orbits Launch Date February 17, 2007 6:01 p.m. EST Launch Location Kennedy Space Center Launch Vehicle Delta II 2425-10 Mission Duration 2 years Mission Description/ LASP involvement   LASP Divisions Involved Engineering * Science LASP Mission Web Page   Official Mission Web Page http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/

THEMIS is a constellation mission consisting of 5 satellites in different orbits together with a ground array of magnetometers and auroral cameras located in North America. The outer most satellites will be as far away as 30 Earth radii (200 000 km). THEMIS answers fundamental outstanding questions regarding the magnetospheric substorm instability, a dominant mechanism of transport and explosive release of solar wind energy within geospace. Every fourth night, all five satellites will line up above North America. While the ground-based instruments monitor the space environment by watching the aurora (Northern Lights), the satellites will directly observe the processes that drive it.

LASP has designed and built the Digital Fields Board (DFB) for the THEMIS mission (5 flight-units plus 1 spare). The DFB is the main processing unit for the electric fields instrument and the search-coil magnetometers. When THEMIS is launched, several LASP scientists will be heavily involved in analyzing the data from a number of instruments.