After an impressive 15-year mission, NASA’s AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) spacecraft has fallen silent due to a battery power failure.
In a brief blog post highlighted by Gizmodo, NASA announced the end of operational support for the spacecraft. The agency first detected issues with AIM’s battery in 2019, but the probe continued to transmit a substantial amount of data back to Earth. However, following a recent decrease in battery power, AIM has become unresponsive.
The AIM team will keep an eye on the spacecraft for another two weeks in case it reboots, but NASA’s announcement suggests that they aren’t very optimistic.
Launched in 2007, the AIM mission aimed to investigate noctilucent or night-shining clouds, also known as fossilized clouds due to their ability to persist for centuries in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Positioned 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the spacecraft provided invaluable data to researchers. AIM’s observations contributed to 379 peer-reviewed papers, including a 2018 study that discovered that human-induced climate change-related methane emissions are causing night-shining clouds to form more frequently.
This is a remarkable achievement for a mission initially intended to last only two years. AIM’s conclusion follows the deorbiting of NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, another long-serving spacecraft that spent nearly four decades gathering ozone and atmospheric measurements.