THEMIS and the March 2007 Substorm
NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm in March of 2007. This visualization combines the orbits of the THEMIS satellites with a magnetohydrodynamical simulation of the Earth's magnetosphere corresponding to this time.
Opening with a view over the North geographic pole, we see the five THEMIS satellites moving along their common orbit. The camera then moves down into the equatorial plane and behind the Earth before we fade in the isosurface enclosing the regions where particles have at least 5keV of energy.
A view of the five THEMIS satellites (the color dots) from a location above the north geographic pole.
The camera moves down near the equatorial plane presenting a side view of the satellites in their orbits.
Zooming in on the location of the satellites...
we move to a location behind the Earth.
Red isosurfaces fade in, representing the boundary of regions where electron temperature (AKA mean energy) exceeds 5 kilo-electron volts.
The boundaries of the high-energy electrons engulf the THEMIS satellites.
Energetic electrons continue to flow around the satellites.
The substorm begins to subside around 11:30UTC.
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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)
- Joachim Raeder (University of New Hampshire)
Missions
This page is related to the following missions:Series
This page can be found in the following series:Datasets used
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[THEMIS]
ID: 177This dataset can be found at: http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.shtml
See all pages that use this dataset -
SSCweb ephemerides (SSCweb)
ID: 538Satellite ephemerides
This dataset can be found at: http://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov
See all pages that use this dataset -
GGCM [Geospace General Circulation Model (GGCM)]
ID: 582MHD Magnetospheric simulation
This dataset can be found at: http://openggcm.sr.unh.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
See all pages that use this dataset
Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Release date
This page was originally published on Monday, December 10, 2007.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.