Latest THEMIS Stories

Arizona State University Letting secondary school students use an operating NASA spacecraft to take images of Mars is about as hands-on as science education can get. Nor are the students just aiming the space camera randomly. Instead, they are targeting an image on the Red Planet's surface to answer a scientific question about Mars that the students themselves have developed. That's the exciting premise of the award-winning Mars Student Imaging Project (MSIP). A key component of...

NASA On Earth, scientists can observe weather patterns, and more importantly can predict them, through the use of tens of thousands of weather observatories scattered around the globe. Up in the space surrounding Earth -- a space that seethes with its own space weather made of speeding charged particles and constantly changing magnetic fields that can impact satellites – there are only a handful of spacecraft to watch for solar and magnetic storms. The number of observatories has been...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Twenty years ago, the United States relationship with Japan showed just how restored it was since the second world war, as the two countries' space agencies launched a joint mission together. The Geotail mission launched into space aboard a Delta II launch vehicle 20 years ago from this week, kick-starting a set of coordinated missions known as the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) project. ISTP studied the magnetic...

GREENBELT, Md., May 21, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Magnetometers built by scientists and engineers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for NASA's Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission have been delivered to the University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory for integration into the Particles and Field Package. (Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "The team worked hard and completed delivery of the...

Interop 2012, LAS VEGAS, Nevada, May 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Titan IC Systems has developed a unique capability, offering a flexible yet high-performance solution for L2-L7 processing, for the security appliances market. This is comprised of a stateful classification, flow statistics and RegEx-based content processor at 100Gb/s. Titan's L2-L7 Processing product - Themis - has been significantly optimized to take full advantage of Altera's latest 28 nm high-performance...

The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has completed an unprecedented full decade of observing Mars from orbit. THEMIS captured this image on Feb. 19, 2012, 10 years to the day after the camera recorded its first view of Mars. This image covers an area 11 by 32 miles (19 by 52 kilometers) in the Nepenthes Mensae region north of the Martian equator. The view depicts a knobby landscape where the southern highlands are breaking up as the terrain...

[ Watch the Video ] People still talk about the launch. It was the first – and so far, only – time NASA has launched five satellites at one time. Carefully balanced inside a Delta II rocket, the five THEMIS (short for Timed History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) spacecraft were launched into space from Cape Canaveral at 6:01 p.m. ET on February 17, 2007. The spacecraft were nestled in a ring shape, four around the outside and one on a middle pedestal. A...

  Thursday’s scheduled launch of the Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), which was postponed to Friday morning at 9:16 a.m., has been postponed again until Saturday, September 10. NASA delayed the initial launch due to upper-level winds that may have posed a threat. The space agency said the high winds at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida prevented a launch opportunity at 8:37 a.m. on Thursday. The agency pushed the launch...

Two small NASA probes that had been used to study space weather now are orbiting the moon to study its interior and surface composition.The spacecraft, called Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS), began their journey away from Earth's orbit in July 2009. The first spacecraft entered lunar orbit on June 27, and the second on July 17.Engineers used complex orbit maneuvers to relocate the spacecraft to their new locations....

2 probes, repositioned from THEMIS mission, will map surface magnetic fieldsBy Robert Sanders, University of California - BerkeleyOn Sunday, July 17, the moon will acquire its second new companion in less than a month. That's when the second of two probes built by the University of California, Berkeley, and part of NASA's five-satellite THEMIS mission will drop into a permanent lunar orbit after a meandering, two-year journey from its original orbit around Earth.The first of the two probes...