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May 12, 2009: Check out this Space Storms video produced by the Austrailian Broadcasting Corporation network. John Bonnell (THEMIS) and Stu Bale (STEREO) as well as the Berkeley Mission Operations Center are featured prominently. Thanks to John Bonnell, John McDonald, the Mission Ops team and the many members of the UCB who contributed their time and made the filming a success. May 8, 2009: This week, Vassilis Angelopoulos writes:
April 24, 2009: A message from THEMIS PI Vassilis Angelopoulos.
March 17, 2009: Our education group at the Space Sciences Lab is participating in the 2009 International Year of Astronomy in many ways--from star parties to outreach events to webcasts. As part of this, we are coordinating with Mission Operations to take part in the April 3rd “Live 24-Hour Research Observatory Webcast” component of the 100 Hours of Astronomy project for the International Year of Astronomy 2009: http://www.100hoursofastronomy.org/program/75-live-24-hour-research-observatory-webcast The SSL Mission Ops Center (MOC) operates THEMIS, RHESSI and FAST missions. Other locations and other NASA missions participating in the 24-hour Observatory include Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Swift, Fermi, SOHO, TRACE, STEREO, GALEX, Chandra, Spitzer, (plus ESA scientists highlighting XMM-Newton and Integral). For our MOC /THEMIS, RHESSI and FAST section, we will have a short pre-recorded video segment and then a live interview in the Mission Operations room. Do tune in on April 3rd, 5:40 PM Pacific time to see what sort of exciting events transpire on this end! February 28, 2009: Yet another quiet week in THEMIS Operations Land, at least as far as operating the satellites goes. However, on 24 Feb, the UC Berkeley flight dynamics team -- as well as our partners at JPL and Goddard -- presented for review the technical details of our plan for sending two of the five THEMIS probes to the moon. The presentation was well received and we were given the go-ahead by NASA! Another tiny "checkup" review remains to be completed in mid-May, and the kick off of the process will start in early July of this year. February 18, 2009: Below is a message from Vassilis Angelopoulos, Pricipal Investigator of the THEMIS Mission.
February 17, 2009: Mark your calendars! Dr. Eric Donovan, lead aurora researcher and Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary, will be giving a talk on the science behind auroras and the THEMIS mission. Date: Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 For more details and further information, click here. This presentation is part of the 2009 International Year of Astonomy Celebrations in the Northwest Territories. January 24th, 2009: Things have been pretty quiet this week, at least in THEMIS operations land anyway. The only activity of note this week was clearing a "bad bit" in the science solid state recorder on one of the probes. The space environment is full of gamma rays and charged particles, and every once in a great while, they will hit a memory cell in the solid state recorder and cause it to go crazy -- which results in a detectable error. Often, the spacecraft's flight software will detect the error and correct it, but very occasionally, it can only be fixed by turning off the power to the solid state recorder, letting it cool, and turning it back on. That's what we had to do for THEMIS C this week, and of course the only logical time to do it was VERY early in the morning. Fortunately, that solved the "stuck bit" problem and we're back to gathering data!
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