Mission Name TIMED: Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics SEE Mission Patch TIMED SEE Poster (1.2Mb) LASP Instruments SEE: Solar EUV Experiment Principal Investigator: Tom Woods Destination approx 388 mile Earth Orbit Launch Date December 7th, 2001 Launch Location Vandenberg Air Force Base Launch Vehicle Delta II 7920-10 Mission Duration   Mission Description/ LASP involvement   LASP Divisions Involved Engineering * Science * Operations LASP Mission Web Page http://lasp.colorado.edu/see/ Official Mission Web Page http://stp.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions/timed/timed.htm

The mesosphere and lower thermosphere/ionosphere, atmospheric layers that act as the gateway between Earth and space, are the least explored regions of the Earth's atmosphere. TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics) studies how the sun and human activity affect these regions, where the sun's energy first becomes part of the Earth's environment.

The Solar EUV Experiment (SEE) is one of the four scientific instruments aboard the TIMED spacecraft. The SEE instrument is determining the irradiance of the highly variable solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, one of the major energy sources for the upper atmosphere. The SEE measurements are fundamental for the TIMED mission's investigation of the energetics in the tenuous but highly variable layers of the atmosphere above 60 km.

The SEE instrument was developed at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado (CU) . Initially, the SEE instrument was developed at the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) from 1993 to 1997.