NASA’s Geotail mission operations come to an end after 30 years

After 30 years in orbit, mission operations for the joint NASA-JAXA Geotail spacecraft have ended, after the failure of the spacecraft’s remaining information recorder.

After its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail orbited Earth, gathering an immense dataset on the construction and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth’s protecting magnetic bubble. Geotail was initially slated for a four-year run, however the mission was prolonged a number of instances because of its high-quality information return, which contributed to over a thousand scientific publications.

Whereas one in every of Geotail’s two information recorders failed in 2012, the second continued to work till experiencing an anomaly on June 28, 2022. After makes an attempt to remotely restore the recorder failed, the mission operations had been ended on November 28, 2022.

“Geotail has been a really productive satellite, and it was the primary joint NASA-JAXA mission,” mentioned Don Fairfield, emeritus space scientist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland, and NASA’s first venture scientist for Geotail till his retirement in 2008. “The mission made vital contributions to our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic subject to provide magnetic storms and auroras.”

With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed by means of the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering information on the bodily course of at play there to assist perceive how the move of vitality and particles from the sun attain Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, together with serving to scientists perceive how shortly materials from the sun passes into the magnetosphere, the bodily processes at play on the magnetosphere’s boundary, and figuring out oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum within the lunar ambiance.

The mission additionally helped establish the placement of a course of referred to as magnetic reconnection, which is a serious conveyor of fabric and vitality from the sun into the magnetosphere and one of many instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the best way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS), which launched in 2015.

Over time, Geotail collaborated with lots of NASA’s different space missions together with MMS, Van Allen Probes, Time Historical past of Occasions and Macroscale Interactions throughout Substorms mission, Cluster, and Wind. With an orbit that took it so far as 120,000 miles from Earth at instances, Geotail helped present complementary information from distant elements of the magnetosphere to offer scientists a whole image of how occasions seen in a single space have an effect on different areas. Geotail additionally paired with observations on the bottom to verify the placement and mechanisms of how aurora kind.

Though Geotail is completed gathering new information, the scientific discoveries aren’t over. Scientists will proceed to review Geotail’s information within the coming years.