A 30-year-old NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission has come to an end with the closing of operations on the Geotail satellite.
Geotail orbited the Earth in a highly elliptical orbit that allowed it to study this tail, learning about its structure and dynamics. It used instruments to monitor magnetic and electrical fields, as well as observe plasma and high-energy particles. Originally designed to operate for just four years, the satellite lasted an impressive 30 years of operation, supplying data for over a thousand scientific papers.
Geotail did not have an easy time of it throughout its entire mission. In 1993, a year after its launch, one of its computers failed, and it looked as if one of the mission’s main instruments, the Low Energy Particles experiment, would be unusable. The team tried to reset the computer with no luck, so they chose a nail-biting option to adjust the satellite’s orbit by sending it around the dark side of the moon, where it would temporarily be blocked from sunlight and without power.
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