The Geotail mission launched in 1992 to study Earth's magnetosphere, but the satellite's future is now in doubt.
this week. Geotail was originally equipped with two data recorders, one of which stopped working in 2012 after gathering 20 years’ worthcarried the mission through until recently when it experienced the malfunction.
Mission engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency discovered the anomaly and have been working to figure out the cause andHowever, they have so far been unable to recover the spacecraft’s data recorder, which means that science data can no longer be collected or downlinked to ground control. NASA and JAXA are currently trying to determine how to bestGeotail launched on July 24, 1992, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
To observe the magnetosphere, Geotail was placed into an extremely elliptical orbit around Earth. The spacecraft performed 14 flybys of the Moon during its first two years to adjust its orbit, coming as close as 7,858 miles of the lunar surface. Geotail first observed the far region of the magnetotail, but the spacecraft’s lower orbit allowed itjust inside the
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Data recorder failure on 30-year-old NASA spacecraft could end magnetic field missionRobert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter sciencef1rst.
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