TIMED (original) (raw)
Please make a donation to support Gunter's Space Page.
Thank you very much for visiting Gunter's Space Page. I hope that this site is useful and informative for you.
If you appreciate the information provided on this site, please consider supporting my work by making a simple and secure donation via PayPal. Please help to run the website and keep everything free of charge. Thank you very much.
TIMED [JHU/APL]
The TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics & Dynamics) mission was designed to study the physical and chemical processes acting within and upon the coupled mesosphere, lower-thermosphere/ ionosphere system between about 60 and 180 km. TIMED investigates a region that is difficult to study because it is too high for even the largest research balloons and still dense enough to quickly cause a satellite to decay from orbit. Because of the lack of measurements this atmospheric region is often referred to as the "ignorosphere". Absorping a considerable amount of solar ultraviolet radiation from the sun and intercepting high energy atomic particles, this region is the "skin" between the life-sustaining lower layers and outer space. Originally proposed as a two-spacecraft mission, the TIMED project was rescoped to a one-satellite mission due to budgetary pressure. TIMED was downsized to a core mission of four experiments and six interdisciplinary investigations and mission management was moved to JHU-APL in an effort to reduce the cost to the $100M level. The instruments include:
- the Solar EUV Experiment (SEE) provided by the University of Colorado,
- the TIMED Doppler Interferometer (TIDI) provided by the University of Michigan,
- the Global Ultraviolet Imager (GUVI) provided by the Aerospace Corp., and
- the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) provided by NASA's Langley Research Center.
Nation: | USA |
---|---|
Type / Application: | Science, Atmosphere |
Operator: | NASA |
Contractors: | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) |
Equipment: | SEE, TIDI, GUVI, SABER |
Configuration: | |
Propulsion: | |
Power: | 2 deployable solar arrays, batteries |
Lifetime: | |
Mass: | 548 kg |
Orbit: | 627 km × 640 km, 74.1� |
Satellite | COSPAR | Date | LS | Launch Vehicle | Remarks |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
TIMED (STP 1) | 2001-055B | 07.12.2001 | Va SLC-2W | Delta-7920-10C | with Jason 1 |