THEMIS Orbits: Dayside Science Configuration
In the early part of the mission, the five THEMIS satellites will follow the same orbit single-file. The apogee of the orbit will take the spacecraft just beyond the bow shock of the Earth's magnetosphere. This will enable the satellites to collect data in this region over a short range of time so that the time history can be studied. The dates in this visualization are based on an ephemeris assuming a launch on January 20, 2007. The satellite colors are: red=P1, green=P2, cyan=P3, blue=P4, magenta=P5.
This movie looks down onto the north pole of the Earth and the five THEMIS spacecraft travelling along a single elliptical orbit. The Sun is to the left.
Same movie as above but no date slate.
This is an opening shot of the animation. Satellites P1 (red) and P4 (blue) are too close together to be distinguished as separate objects on this scale.
Same image as above with no date slate.
The satellites swing through their perigee, moving more swiftly close to the Earth. You can now distinguish satellites P1 (red) and P4 (blue).
Same movie as above with no date slate.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animator
- Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
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Scientists
- Vassilis Angelopoulos (University of California at Berkeley)
- David G. Sibeck (NASA/GSFC)
Release date
This page was originally published on Thursday, December 14, 2006.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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SSCweb ephemerides (SSCweb)
ID: 538Satellite ephemerides
This dataset can be found at: http://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov
See all pages that use this dataset
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.