THEMIS's principal investigator is Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), which is leading the mission for NASA and which designed and built the instruments in collaboration with agencies in Germany, France, and Austria.
The first NASA mission comprised of five different coordinated spacecraft, all five THEMIS spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral together aboard a single rocket on February 17, 2007. Eventually the five will study the mysterious eruptions in Earth's Northern and Southern Lights known as "substorms," but first they must achieve widely separated orbits, a process that will take several months.
An acronym for Time History of Events and Macroscopic Interactions during Substorms, THEMIS will obtain the evidence needed to solve what principal investigator Angelopoulos calls "a nagging question that the field has to resolve" -- namely, competing theories about where auroral substorms originate in the magnetosphere.
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