After 30 years in orbit, the Geotail mission has come to an end. NASA announced Wednesday the end of these operations following a failure in the spacecraft’s latest data recorder.
Since its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail has orbited the Earth to collect an “immense data set” on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, “Earth’s protective magnetic ball.”
“Geotail was originally scheduled for a period of four years, but the mission was extended several times due to the return of high-quality data, which contributed to more than a thousand scientific publications,” recalls the US space agency.
One of the spacecraft’s recorders failed in 2012, and the other continued to function until June 28, 2022. After several repair attempts, operations ended on November 28, 2022.
“The mission has made important contributions to our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to produce magnetic storms and auroras,” said Don Fairfield, a former space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. .
Geotail also navigated the “invisible edges of the magnetosphere, collecting data to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reaches Earth.”
“Geotail has made many scientific discoveries, helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at the edge of the magnetosphere, and the identification of oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere. “. NASA, stressing that the mission “also helped identify the location of a process called ‘magnetic reconnection,’ which is an important transporter of matter and energy from the Sun to the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery paved the way for the Multiscale Magnetospheric mission, launched in 2015”, explains the US space agency.
Although Geotail has finished collecting new data, the scientific discoveries are not over yet, NASA says. Scientists will continue to study the data provided by this mission in the coming years.
Source: TSF
