[SatNews] ATK (NYSE: ATK) reports that two of the five microsatellites the Company built for NASA’s THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) mission have been redirected to new orbits around the Moon to study the Moon's Interaction with the Sun.

The duo recently began observations to study how solar wind electrifies, alters, and erodes the moon’s surface. The new mission is called ARTEMIS, or Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of Moon’s Interaction with the Sun. ATK built the five spacecraft buses for the THEMIS probes that marked NASA’s first five-satellite constellation launched aboard a single rocket. NASA launched the fleet in 2007 to study the physics of geomagnetic storms into the Earth’s magnetosphere. The unique constellation of satellites has already unearthed a rich collection of data that helped scientists solve several longstanding mysteries of substorm and magnetosphere interaction which produce the Northern Lights. The findings provided scientists with the tools to help determine how Earth’s magnetosphere stores and releases energy from the sun by triggering geomagnetic substorms. The three remaining THEMIS satellites continue to study substorms and provide valuable scientific data.

The ARTEMIS mission is a joint effort among NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD., NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA., the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley, CA and UCLA.