NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft has observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic ropes and witnessed small explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field that effect the solar wind.

Reporters will learn about vivid auroras that surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute and about the unprecedented power of the substorm which occurred on March 23, 2007.

Where does all that energy come from? THEMIS may have found the answer.

Vassilis Angelopoulos - THEMIS Principal Investigator, University of California, Los Angeles

Prof. Vassilis Angelopoulos is a space physicist with 15 years of experience in magnetospheric research. He has authored and co- authored 65 publications in refereed journals on data analysis, plasma theory and space plasma phenomenology, space technology, space instrumentation and mission analysis and design. His research interests include plasma sheet transport, electromagnetic instabilities in the plasma sheet and its boundary, beam-induced ionospheric low frequency waves, substorm physics, turbulence and self-organized criticality.





David Sibeck - THEMIS Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Dr. David Sibeck has worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (1985-2002), NASA Headquarters (2004) and NASA GSFC (2003 - present). He is the author or co-author of over 180 scientific articles on Sun-Solar System Connection Physics. He received the American Geophysical Union’s MacElwane award in 1992 and is a fellow of that organization. He is a corresponding editor for EOS, Campaign Coordinator for the National Science Foundation’s Global Interaction campaign, and Executive Secretary for the International Living With a Star program. His research interests focus on the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction, in particular the bow shock and magnetopause.





Jonathan Eastwood - THEMIS researcher, University of California at Berkeley

Dr. Jonathan Eastwood received his PhD. in Physics in 2003 from Imperial College London, UK, where he worked on the European Space Agency Cluster mission and studied the behavior and properties of the Earth’s bow shock. Subsequently, he was a National Research Council Resident Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and in 2005 moved to the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley to work more closely on the THEMIS mission. In his research, he aims to understand the basic science that governs space weather, in particular the physics of shocks and magnetic reconnection. Since 2002 he has been author or co-author on 23 publications studying these subjects.