Swales Aerospace announced Tuesday it has delivered the last of five micro-satellite buses for NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission. THEMIS comprises five identical high-performance satellites flying through Earth’s magnetosphere, a region of the upper atmosphere extending for hundreds of thousands of miles. The mission is scheduled to launch in October.
THEMIS is designed to determine the dynamics of the phenomena known as auroras – or Northern Lights in the northern hemisphere. Each of the five mico-satellites carries an elaborate suite of electric, magnetic and particle sensing instruments.
Swales Aerospace delivered the satellite dispenser probe carrier as well as the spacecraft buses. All of the micro-satellites were integrated at the company’s Beltsville, Md., facilities and delivered to the mission’s Principal Investigator team at the University of California, Berkeley.
THEMIS is part of NASA’s Medium Explorer, or MEDEX, program.
