Longueuil, Quebec, February 18, 2007 – A key phase in a project to better understand the northern lights got off the ground last night. Five NASA satellites, launched yesterday from Cape Canaveral, will soon align to form a constellation over northern Canada every four days to gather scientific data about the aurora borealis. A network of 20 observatories will record the same phenomenon from the ground. The Canadian Space Agency is supporting THEMIS ground operations in Canada. THEMIS is a NASA-funded mission led by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and involves scientists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The mission will investigate what causes auroras in the Earth's atmosphere to dramatically change from slowly shimmering waves of light to wildly shifting streaks of colour.
Although we know that the aurora are caused by particles emitted by the sun that have been released into the Earth's magnetosphere, scientists want to know more about how and why northern lights occur. They will be analyzing the spacecraft measurements in combination with data from ground stations located throughout the tundra, from Alaska to Labrador.
"With 16 ground stations spread across its territory, Canada plays an integral part in the THEMIS mission," said Dr. William Liu, senior scientist in Solar-Terrestrial Sciences at the Canadian Space Agency. "Scientists from five Canadian universities have teamed up to operate the observatories, gather data, and analyze it. Combining THEMIS satellite and ground data will improve our understanding of how energy from the sun produces the northern lights and other space weather effects," added Dr. Liu.
The Canadian science team is led by Dr. Eric Donovan of the University of Calgary, and includes scientists from the Universities of Alberta, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan, Athabasca University, and Natural Resources Canada's Geomagnetic Laboratory. The Canadian Space Agency has allocated over $1.4 million to fund current Canadian THEMIS research activities.
Dr. Donovan's team has set up instruments in Fort Simpson, Fort Smith, Rankin Inlet, Inuvik, and Whitehorse, among other locations. Each station houses an automated all-sky camera that will take pictures every three seconds each night, over at least a two-year observation period, collecting more than 200 million images.
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For more information:
Julie Simard
Canadian Space Agency
Media Relations
Telephone: (450) 926-4370
E-mail: julie.simard@space.gc.ca
