Latest THEMIS Stories

Karen C. Fox, NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterWhether it's a giant solar flare or a beautiful green-blue aurora, just about everything interesting in space weather happens due to a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. Reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines cross and create a burst of energy. These bursts can be so big they're measured in megatons of TNT.Several spacecraft have already sent back tantalizing data when they happened to witness a magnetic reconnection event in...

NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft combined with computer models have helped track the origin of the energetic particles in Earth's magnetic atmosphere that appear during a kind of space weather called a substorm. Understanding the source of such particles and how they are shuttled through Earth's atmosphere is crucial to better understanding the Sun's complex space weather system and thus protect satellites or even humans in...

MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 22, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- ATK (NYSE: ATK) and NASA are marking the 10-year anniversary of NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. The spacecraft, built by ATK for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, had an initial design and mission life of one year, but continues operating today, more than nine years past the initial mission. The EO-1 satellite launched on November 21, 2000. ATK served as the Prime Contractor, Satellite Mission Integrator and Bus...

New mission, ARTEMIS, begins science operations in Lagrange-point parking orbitTwo micro-satellites originally launched into Earth's orbit in 2007 by NASA have been redirected by University of California, Berkeley, scientists toward new orbits around the moon, extending study of the earth and moon's interaction with the solar wind.The second of the two probes settled into a temporary "Lagrange-point" orbit on Friday, Oct. 22, inaugurating science operations for a new mission dubbed...

Flight Dynamics data from THEMIS-B (one of the two ARTEMIS spacecraft) indicated that one of the EFI (electric field instrument)spherical tip masses may have been struck by a meteoroid at 0605 UT on October 14. All science instruments continue to collect data. The probe and science instruments aboard the spacecraft continue to operate nominally. The upcoming insertion into Lissajous orbit will not be interrupted.ARTEMIS stands for "Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of...

Researchers using NASA's fleet of five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a form of space weather that packs the punch of an earthquake and plays a key role in sparking bright Northern Lights. They call it "the spacequake."A spacequake is a temblor in Earth's magnetic field. It is felt most strongly in Earth orbit, but is not exclusive to space. The effects can reach all the way down to the surface of Earth itself."Magnetic reverberations have been detected at ground stations...

Scientists using a NASA funded telescope have detected water-ice and carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid. The cold hard facts of the discovery of the frosty mixture on one of the asteroid belt's largest occupants, suggests that some asteroids, along with their celestial brethren, comets, were the water carriers for a primordial Earth. The research is published in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature."For a long time the thinking was that you couldn't find a...

Asteroids, once thought as dry and lifeless, may be home to water and organic materials, also known as the building blocks of lifeAsteroids may not be the dark, dry, lifeless chunks of rock scientists have long thought.Josh Emery, research assistant professor with the earth and planetary sciences department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has found evidence of water ice and organic material on the asteroid 24 Themis. This evidence supports the idea that asteroids could be...

A network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission has made a startling discovery about the Northern Lights. Sometimes, vast curtains of aurora borealis collide, producing spectacular outbursts of light. Movies of the phenomenon were unveiled at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union today in San Francisco."Our jaws dropped when we saw the movies for the first time," says space scientist Larry Lyons of UCLA, a leading member of the team that made...

In 1959, only two years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and ignited the space race, the University of California, Berkeley, created a laboratory devoted to space science that has grown to be one of the most active academic space research labs in the country.Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) has provided instruments for 75 satellites, two dozen rockets, nearly 200 balloon flights and numerous ground-based experiments. Eight of the...