NASA Extends its TIMED Mission for Fourth Occasion

Nine years after starting its unprecedented look at the gateway between Earth's environment and space, not to reveal collecting more data on the upper atmosphere than any other satellite, NASA’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) mission has been extended once more.

Before the launch of TIMED, the mesosphere and lower thermosphere/ionosphere which help protect us from harmful solar radiation had been one of the least explored and understood regions of our environment.

The mission will now continue to study the influences of the sun and humans on our upper atmosphere. TIMED began its extended mission on Oct. 1, 2010, and will collect data through 2014. This is its fourth extension since the original 2-year mission began in January 2002. TIMED will focus this time on a problem that has long puzzled scientists: differentiating between human-induced and naturally occurring changes in this atmospheric region. This extension also allows TIMED to continue collecting data for longer than a full 11-year solar cycle.

The key tool performing this work is known as SABER (or Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry), built by Hampton University in Hampton, Va. SABER can remotely intelligent composition and temperature in the mesosphere.