It was only a matter of time before NASA’s AIM project spacecraft is unable to send data. Nevertheless, NASA is pleased that the Explorer 90 probe has held up so well so far.
The AIM project – AIM stands for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere – originally started in 2007 and was planned to run for just two years. Since then, the probe has been circling the earth in a polar orbit to observe noctilucent clouds.
Operational support ended
in one short blog post shared NASA announced this week that it was ending operational support for the spacecraft due to battery failure. NASA first noticed the problems with the AIM battery in 2019, but the probe was still sending a significant amount of data back to Earth. Therefore, operations had only recently been officially extended until September 2023 and then wanted to see further. After a further decrease in battery power, however, the probe can no longer be addressed. The AIM team will monitor the probe for another two weeks to allow for a restart, but sees little chance of that.
The exploration of the mesosphere has made great progress as a result of the project. The data collected and already analyzed by AIM has been published in over 300 publications, including a recent study from 2018, which found that methane emissions caused by human-caused climate change lead to night-time emissions form glowing clouds more and more frequently.
See also:
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