Geotail was launched in July 1992 and is designed to study Earth’s magnetosphere because the particles are affected by our planet’s magnetic field.
It is important for our well-being because it protects us from dangerous space radiation. Because this radiation comes mainly from the sun’s solar wind, the magnetosphere is not a round bubble – instead, it forms like a long tail on the night side of the planet due to the influx of sun particles.
The geographic tail was orbiting Earth in a very elliptical orbit, which allowed him to study this tail and learn more about its structure and dynamics. The instruments have been used to monitor magnetic and electric fields, as well as plasmas and high-energy particles.
Originally designed to last just four years, the satellite has lasted 30 years of operation and provided data for more than a thousand scientific papers, Digitartlends reported.
The mission was also noteworthy because it was a partnership between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA.
“Geotail was a very productive satellite, and the first joint mission between NASA and JAXA,” Don Fairfield, the first scientist on NASA’s Geotail project, said in a statement. “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 aurora borealis.”
Geotail has not been easy throughout his mission. In 1993, a year after its launch, one of its computers failed and it appeared that one of the main instruments of the mission, the Low Energy Particle Experiment, would be inoperable.
The team attempts to reset the computer without success, so they make a hard choice to adjust the satellite’s orbit by sending it around the dark side of the moon, where it will be temporarily blocked from sunlight and without food.
After 10 minutes in the dark, the satellite returned to sunlight and the computer restarted successfully.
This allowed the mission to go ahead as planned, but after decades of use, components began to fail.
In 2012, one of the data loggers went out of business. The second recorder worked until June 2022, when it suffered a problem and could not be restarted.
Mission operations ended in November 2022, and NASA recently announced that the mission has officially ended.
The geographic tail leaves a legacy of magnetospheric discoveries, as well as traces of material in the Moon’s extremely thin atmosphere.
Its work continues on new missions such as the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission launched in 2015.
