Themis Launch a success

THEMIS, short for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms, marks the most spacecraft ever launched at one time for the space agency, NASA officials said.

The mission’s first probe – dubbed Probe A – popped free of its carriage about 73 minutes after launch as planned, with its four counterparts deploying like flower petals about three seconds later.

Each about the size of a dishwasher, the five 282-pound (128-kilogram) THEMIS probes are nearly identical and designed to track the origin of powerful geomagnetic substorms within the Earth’s magnetic field.