Thought it might be appropriate to start this thread. The five-spacecraft THEMIS mission was almost launched today, but has been slipped to 17 Feb 1801-1819 EST (2301-2319 GMT) due to unfavorable weather.

This mission may yield some materially important findings. Its objective is to determine the cause of auroral "substorms", which can have an impact on Earth-orbiting spacecraft as well as some ground systems at nothern latitudes (like aircraft compasses in Alaska...yep, I've seen it). Here's the homepage:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/main/index.html

Launch occurred on schedule, but having trouble with the stream feed from NASA...vehicle is nearly in orbit as of 2309 GMT, awaiting separation of the sats.

Orbit acheived, all nominal. Need another 54 minutes for next burn and sattelites release...stay tuned.

Am I the only one who finds it funny the mission is called THEMIS, just as a Mars Odyssey instrument?
Have they already started running out of meaningless acronyms so they have to start reusing them?

5 spacecrafts have been released = Success

A sort of compensation for the ones that take two names : Topex-Poseidon for exemple

I did a double take myself, when I heard of this particular mission. But I just found out that "THEMIS" isn't exactly meaningless, it's the name of the Greek goddess of Justice, usually represented as blindfolded, and holding a set of scales and a sword.

Themis stands for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms.

Scientists identify trigger for northern lights.