NASA Says Goodbye To The AIM Spacecraft

After 15 years, the NASA AIM space mission ends. On Thursday, the US space agency said the spacecraft had stopped responding to commands from Earth due to a battery failure. In general, problems with the AIM battery began to be recorded back in 2019, but the probe continued to send “significant amounts of data” to Earth. But after a recent battery drain, the AIM system stopped responding. The project team will monitor the satellite for another two weeks in case it suddenly comes to life, but, apparently, this will not happen. However, it was initially assumed that AIM would work for only two years. So it has already exceeded its service life by seven times.

The spacecraft has proven invaluable to scientists, as data collected by AIM has appeared in 379 peer-reviewed papers, including a recent 2018 study that found methane emissions from human-induced climate change are causing nighttime glow clouds to form more frequently.

AIM’s demise follows the demise of another long-serving NASA spacecraft. Earlier this year, the agency decommissioned the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite after nearly four decades of collecting measurements of ozone and atmospheric levels.