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Presenter Multimedia

Nicky Fox, deputy project scientist for the Living With A Star, Radiation Belt Storm Probe Mission, Applied Physics Laboratory (Biography)

1) Auroral substorm from Polar

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NASA's Polar spacecraft captured this image of an auroral substorm from space. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
 

Vassilis Angelopoulos, THEMIS principal investigator, University of California (Biography)

2) What is a substorm?

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This animation explains auroral substorms. THEMIS's primary mission is to study them. Substorms occur when Earth's magnetosphere suddenly releases vast amounts of stored solar wind energy. Substorms start from a small region in space but within minutes cover immense regions of the magnetosphere. Different possible triggers have different locations, so the key to solving this mystery is placing spacecraft in various locations in Earth's magnetic field to help find the elusive substorm point of origin. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

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7) What is the result?
 

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THEMIS observations confirm for the first time that magnetic reconnection in the magnetotail triggers the onset of substorms. Substorms are the sudden violent eruption of space weather. This animation illustrates the discovery, which asserts a substorm starting because of a particular pattern. The pattern is a period of reconnection, followed by rapid auroral brightening and rapid expansion of the aurora toward the poles, culminating in a redistribution of the electrical currents flowing in near-Earth space. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
 

David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (Biography)

8) THEMIS mission and substorm simulation

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This visualization shows the THEMIS probes flying through a substorm. It combines simulations of the THEMIS mission orbits with a Geospace General Circulation Model (GGCM) simulation. It illustrates how the five THEMIS satellites will work together to detect substorm events in the magnetosphere. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio; Tom Fogal (University of New Hampshire) for assistance with the GGCM data extraction software; Sabine Frey (UC Berkeley) for spacecraft orbit information

9) Ground stations ASI array
 

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A collection of ground-based All-Sky Imagers (ASI) captures the aurora brightening caused by a substorm. This network is an important part of the THEMIS mission and is considered the sixth satellite. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
 

Charles Goodrich, THEMIS project scientist, NASA's Science Missions Directorate: Heliophysics Division (Biography)