Geotail mission finally ends after 30 years
Though initially planned as a four year mission, the Geotail probe — designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere — finally failed on June 28, 2022 after 30 years of operation.
With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering data on the physical process at play there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetosphere’s boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.
The mission also helped identify the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major conveyor of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.
Though it failed in June, engineers worked until November attempting to recover the spacecraft. When those efforts failed, NASA officially ended the mission.
Though initially planned as a four year mission, the Geotail probe — designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere — finally failed on June 28, 2022 after 30 years of operation.
With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering data on the physical process at play there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetosphere’s boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.
The mission also helped identify the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major conveyor of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.
Though it failed in June, engineers worked until November attempting to recover the spacecraft. When those efforts failed, NASA officially ended the mission.