After 15 years in space, NASA’s AIM mission comes to an end. in a short blog post seen by gizmodo, the agency said Thursday that it was ending operational support for the spacecraft due to a failure in battery power. NASA first noticed problems with AIM’s battery in 2019, but the probe was still sending a “significant amount of data” back to Earth. Following another recent drop in battery power, NASA says that AIM has become unresponsive. The AIM team will monitor the spacecraft for another two weeks in case it restarts, but judging by the tone of NASA’s post, the agency isn’t holding its breath.
NASA launched the AIM – Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere – mission in 2007 to study noctilucent or night glowing clouds, which are sometimes known as fossilized clouds due to the fact that they can last for hundreds of years in Earth’s upper atmosphere. From its vantage point 370 miles above the planet’s surface, the spacecraft proved invaluable to scientists, with data collected by AIM appearing in 379 peer-reviewed papers, including a recent study 2018 which found that methane emissions from human-caused climate change are causing clouds that glow at night to form more frequently. Pretty good for a mission NASA initially expected to operate for just two years. AIM’s demise follows that of another long-standing NASA spacecraft. Earlier this year, the agency deorbited the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite after nearly four decades of collecting atmospheric and ozone measurements.
