Jan. 20, 2006

Erica Hupp 
Headquarters, Washington
(202) 358-1237

Nancy Neal/Bill Steigerwald
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(301) 286-0039 / 5017 

RELEASE: 06-030

NASA MAGNETIC FIELD MISSION ENDS

NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) 
satellite recently ceased operations, bringing to a close a 
successful six-year mission. IMAGE was the premier producer of new 
discoveries on the structure and dynamics of the Earth's external 
magnetic field (magnetosphere) and its contents. 

"The IMAGE mission showed us space around the Earth is anything but 
empty, and that plasma clouds can be imaged and tracked just as we do 
from space for Earth’s surface weather,” said Barbara Giles, IMAGE 
Program Scientist at NASA headquarters. 

Prior to the launch of IMAGE, the energetic particles and electrically 
charged gas (plasma) surrounding the Earth were completely invisible 
to human observers. IMAGE enabled researchers to study the global 
structure and dynamics of the Earth's inner magnetosphere as it 
responded to energy from solar winds. 

"Nearly six years of imagery by the pioneering cameras on IMAGE 
revolutionized our understanding of geospace and our knowledge of its 
space weather," said James Burch, IMAGE principal investigator at the 
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio. 

IMAGE was launched on March 25, 2000. It successfully completed its 
two-year primary mission and continued providing data into December 
2005, when it stopped responding to commands from ground controllers. 
Preliminary analysis indicated the craft's power supply subsystems 
failed, rendering it lifeless. The satellite is in an extended 
elliptical orbit and poses no threat to the planet. 

IMAGE discoveries have been reported in more than 400 peer-reviewed 
publications. More than 20 Ph.D. theses were based on data from the 
mission. Science highlights include: 


Confirmations: plasma plume creation, post-midnight peak in storm 
plasmas, the neutral solar wind, terrestrial origin of geospace storm 
plasmas and continuous nature of magnetic reconnection. 


Discoveries: plasmaspheric shoulders and notches, proton auroras in 
unexpected places, surprisingly slow plasmasphere rotation, a hot 
oxygen geocorona and a secondary interstellar neutral atom stream. 


Resolutions: the source of kilometric continuum radiation, solar- wind 
and auroral intensity effects on ionospheric out flow and the 
relationship between proton and electron auroras during geospace 
storms. 

The IMAGE education and public outreach program received numerous 
awards for videos, books, primary and secondary school curricula, 
teacher training, museum exhibits, planetarium shows, student 
workbooks and web-based information. 

The extensive archival database generated by IMAGE promises to yield 
new discoveries and will support investigations by other spacecraft 
and ground-based observatories for many years. 

IMAGE was a Medium Explorer mission sponsored by NASA's Sun-Earth 
Connections Program and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight 
Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Southwest Research Institute conducts 
IMAGE science operations. James Burch is the mission principal 
Investigator, and Thomas Moore at Goddard is the Mission Scientist. 

For information about the IMAGE mission on the Web, visit: 

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/home

	
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