Madrid. After 30 years in orbit, operations of the joint NASA/JAXA Geotail mission have ended following the failure of the spacecraft’s remaining data recorder.
Since its launch on July 24, 1992, Geotail has orbited the Earth, collecting an immense data set on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth’s protective magnetic bubble. Initially, Geotail had a planned duration of four years, but the mission was extended several times due to the high quality of the data obtained, which led to more than a thousand scientific publications.
Although one of the two Geotail data loggers failed in 2012, the second continued to function until it experienced an anomaly on June 28, 2022. After attempts to remotely repair the logger failed, mission operations ended on June 28. November 2022.
“Geotail has been a very productive satellite, and it was NASA’s first joint mission with JAXA,” said Don Fairfield, space scientist emeritus at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the first scientific of NASA’s Geotail project until his retirement in 2008. “The mission made important contributions to our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field to produce magnetic storms and auroras.”
Using an elongated orbit, Geotail navigated through the invisible fringes of the magnetosphere, collecting data on the physical process that takes place there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reaches Earth. Geotail made many advances scientists, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetospheric boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the atmosphere mole.
The mission also helped pinpoint the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major carrier of material and energy from the Sun to the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery paved the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.
Over the years, Geotail collaborated with many other NASA space missions, such as MMS, Van Allen Probes, Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, Cluster, and Wind.
With an orbit that, at times, took it as close as 120,000 miles from Earth, Geotail helped provide complementary data from remote parts of the magnetosphere to give scientists a complete picture of how events observed in one area affect other regions. Geotail was also paired with ground-based observations to confirm the location and mechanisms of aurora formation.
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