NASA-NSF Collaboration

NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are jointly sponsoring a program that enables the TIMED spacecraft team to closely collaborate with other members of the scientific community studying the MLTI region. This program takes advantage of the synergy between ground- and space-based instruments and of the scientific contributions made by data assimilation and modeling. One of the most significant contributions of the collaborative investigators' program is to provide ground-based data complementary to that provided by the TIMED satellite.

The ground-based participants can observe some, but not all, of the same phenomena the satellite will observe within the MLTI region, such as the aurora, winds, and some temperature and composition changes. But the satellite is the only way to obtain global coverage of the MLTI region since the number and location of ground stations are limited and each can only provide a single data point. Together, however, the spacecraft and ground stations are collaborating to unravel variations in the data regarding time and location to ensure the TIMED mission provides the most accurate data possible.