Artist concept of space weather showing an active Sun with flares and a CME in the upper right, the Earth in the lower right with types of technology affected by space weather to the lower left; satellites, airplanes, the ISS and ground-based electrical lines.
Heliophysics

Studying the Sun-Earth connection.

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Latest News and Features

Earth is surrounded by a giant magnetic bubble, called the magnetosphere. THEMIS' satellites orbit within this.

Six Years of THEMIS: Understanding the Magnetosphere

In THEMIS's sixth year in space, it is helping to show how even small variations in the magnetosphere can sometimes cause extreme space weather ...

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Artist's conception of one of the five THEMIS spacecraft in orbit around Earth.

THEMIS: Watching Aurora and Space Weather

Since 2007, THEMIS has mapped how explosive auroras erupt and solar wind transfers energy to the magnetosphere.

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Animation of Earth's radiation belts following the Halloween Storm of 2003 shows them swelling and shrinking over time.

THEMIS Sees a Great Electron Escape

Filled with electrons and charged particles, the radiation belts regularly swell and shrink, but no one is quite sure how. A new study sheds light on ...

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Mission Overview

    ARTEMIS stands for “Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun”. The ARTEMIS mission uses two of the five in-orbit spacecraft from another NASA Heliophysics constellation of satellites (THEMIS) that were launched in 2007 and successfully completed their mission earlier in 2010. The ARTEMIS mission allowed NASA to repurpose two in-orbit spacecraft to extend their useful science mission, saving tens of millions of taxpayer dollars instead of building and launching new spacecraft.



    THEMIS is a mission to investigate what causes auroras in the Earth's atmosphere to dramatically change from slowly shimmering waves of light to wildly shifting streaks of color. Discovering what causes auroras to change will provide scientists with important details on how the planet's magnetosphere works and the important Sun-Earth connection.

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Related Sites

    Explorers Program
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    THEMIS Spacecraft
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    Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany
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    Institut fuer Weltraumforschung, Austria
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    Centre des Environements Terrestre et Planetaires, France
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    University of Calgary
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    Artemis
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