THEMIS Operations

THEMIS—a five-spacecraft constellation to study magnetospheric events leading to auroral outbursts—launched on February 17, 2007. All aspects of operations are conducted at the Mission Operations Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Activities of the multi-mission operations team include mission and science operations, flight dynamics and ground station operations. Communications with the constellation are primarily established via the Berkeley Ground Station, while NASA’s Ground Network provides secondary pass coverage. In addition, NASA’s Space Network supports maneuver operations near perigee. Following a successful launch campaign, the operations team performed on-orbit probe bus and instrument check-out and commissioning tasks, and placed the constellation initially into a coast phase orbit configuration to control orbit dispersion and conduct initial science operations during the summer of 2007. Mission orbit placement was completed in the fall of 2007, in time for the first winter observing season in the Earth’s magnetospheric tail. Over the course of the first 18 months of on-orbit constellation operations, procedures for instrument configuration, science data acquisition and navigation were refined, and software systems were enhanced. Overall, the implemented ground systems at the Mission Operations Center proved to be very successful and completely adequate to support reliable and efficient constellation operations. A high degree of systems automation is employed to support lights-out operations during off-hours.