The mission ended in early August, marking the conclusion of years of valuable scientific observations and discoveries.
CALIPSO, a joint mission by NASA and the French National Centre for Space Studies , had exhausted its fuel reserves. Due to its decaying orbit, the satellite was no longer capable of generating sufficient power to operate its science instruments.
CALIPSO, which stands for the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, launched on April 28, 2006 in tandem with the cloud-profiling radar system on the CloudSat satellite. CALIPSO used laser light while CloudSat used radio waves.“We had to build, for the first time, a sophisticated lidar capable of operating in space,” Chip Trepte, NASA’s project scientist for CALIPSO, said in a statement.
The two satellites were placed in Sun-synchronous orbits from the North to the South poles, crossing the equator in the early afternoon every day. From their observational perch, they probed the vertical structure of the atmosphere, measuring the altitude of clouds and layers of airborne particles such as dust, sea salt, ash, and soot, according to NASA. Together, they provided scientists with unique simultaneous observations and never-before-seen 3D perspectives of how clouds and aerosols form.
“I have a feeling of accomplishment that the mission we conceived 25 years ago operated successfully over a long period of time,” he added.
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