Feb. 2007

THEMIS Passed Mission Readiness Review

THEMIS, an acronym for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms and also represents the goddess of justice in Greek mythology, has passed its Mission Readiness Board review and started to move to the launch pad area and is slated to be launched on 2/15/2007 from the Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It will be the first time in NASA’s history to launch five identical space probes with a single launch vehicle (Delta-II) and then place them in desired orbits to measure particles and fields. Its primary science objective is to answer fundamental questions regarding the magnetospheric substorm instability, a dominant mechanism of transport and explosive release of solar wind energy within Geospace. It will also help to address the source populations of the radiation belt electrons. LASP is responsible for building the digital fields boards for the electric and magnetic field measurements and also involves with pre-mission design and data analysis and modeling. Bob Ergun and Xinlin Li are Co-Is on the THEMIS mission. The hardware at LASP was done by Jim Westfall, Ken Stevens, Aref Nammari, Chris Cully (Ergun’s graduate student), and Bob Ergun.