USA: After 30 years, the joint NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission known as GeoTell is officially complete.

The GeoTel dataset, in combination with ground-based observations, has several impressive achievements, including elucidating the location and auroral formation mechanisms. The only working data recorder on the spacecraft malfunctioned, resulting in the termination of the mission.

GeoTell, the first mission that NASA and JAXA have launched together, has made several significant advances in its 30-year reign in space.

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In a blog post, NASA said that the mission, "GeoTel, was initially scheduled for four years, but due to its high-quality data return, the mission has been extended several times, contributing to more than a thousand scientific publications." gave."

The primary objective of the GeoTell mission was to investigate the magnetosphere, or "protective magnetic bubble", that surrounds our planet. The 1,000 kg satellite was launched into orbit on July 24, 1992.

The mission has identified oxygen, silicon, sodium and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere and shed light on processes occurring at the boundary of the magnetosphere as well as on the flow of energy and particles from the Sun to Earth.

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One of Geotel's two data recorders, which had been collecting data for nearly 20 years, failed in 2012. The second ran for almost the next ten years, until it developed a technical problem on June 28, 2022.

Remote recovery of the recorder was attempted but failed. Mission operations end on November 28, 2022, according to NASA

Don Fairfield, who served as NASA's first project scientist for the mission and retired in 2008, said that GeoTell has been a very successful satellite and that it was the first joint NASA-JAXA mission.

The mission significantly advanced our knowledge of how the solar wind interacts with the planet's magnetic field to produce magnetic storms and auroras. Scientists will continue to examine GeoTel's data in the coming years.

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The findings of the mission made the MMS mission possible. The magnetic reconnection process, which transfers matter and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and is one of the causes of auroras, was located thanks to the GeoTell mission. This discovery made the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) a possibility in 2015.