(ORDO NEWS) — Geotail was launched on July 24, 1992. During his work, he collected a huge set of data on the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere, Earth‘s protective magnetic bubble.
The high-quality data obtained by the spacecraft has been published in more than a thousand scientific publications.
The first Geotail data logger went out of service in 2012, while the second continued to operate until June 28, 2022. Mission operations were terminated on November 28, 2022, after remote repair attempts failed.
“Geotail has been a very productive satellite and this was the first joint mission between NASA and JAXA,” said Don Fairfield, Astronaut Scientist Emeritus at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
“The mission made an important contribution to our understanding of how the solar wind interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, causing magnetic storms and auroras.”
Geotail passed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, collecting data on the physical phenomena occurring there.
He helped scientists understand how quickly material from the sun enters the magnetosphere.
The spacecraft contributed to the study of physical processes occurring at the edge of the magnetosphere and made it possible to identify oxygen, silicon, sodium and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.
The mission also helped locate the phenomenon of magnetic reconnection, which is associated with the transport of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere.
This discovery paved the way for the MMS mission, which launched in 2015. Over the years, Geotail has collaborated with many other NASA space missions.
Thanks to an orbit that sometimes removed it from Earth by almost 200,000 kilometers, the spacecraft helped to obtain additional data from remote regions of the magnetosphere.
Geotail has also been involved in the study of aurora formation mechanisms.
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