The Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) mission has just completed its primary mission. For two years the 5 THEMIS spacecraft have been maintained in a unique set of orbits that placed them in the Earth's magnetic tail for many weeks at time with all 5 spacecraft forming a one dimensional array stretching from ~ 60,000 km behind the Earth to nearly half way to the Moon, ~ 150,000 km. Important new discoveries include the first multi-point observations revealing how magnetic reconnection gives rise to magnetic storms in the nightside magnetosphere. A survey of THEMIS results from the Science Working Group meeting held earlier this week in Annapolis will be presented.
The TWINS (Two Wide-Angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers) mission is the first mission dedicated to obtaining stereoscopic views of the terrestrial ring current. Two identical instruments onboard two spacecraft measure 1-100 keV ENAs with high angular and time resolution simultaneously from two different vantage points. Despite a low level of geomagnetic activity during years 2008-2009, TWINS captured images of the ring current from a number of moderate storms. We use Comprehensive Ring Current Model (CRCM) to model 3D H+ fluxes for these storms and reconstruct H ENA images. We use the modeled results as a guide to interpret ENA data and derive the time-dependent structure of ring current.
The Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite was launched in April, 2008 in a low latitude orbit (401 by 867 km, 13 deg inclination) carrying Goddard.s Vector Electric Field Investigation (VEFI) and the UTD's Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI). Both instrument suites are revealing new and important results regarding the Earth's low latitude ionosphere, particularly with respect to electrodynamics, ionosphere plasma, and large scale planetary processes within the current solar minimum period. An overview of mission highlights to date will be shown.