NASA’s CloudSat mission was decommissioned in March and moved into position for eventual deorbiting, marking the end of nearly 18 years of operation.
CloudSat was launched in 2006 and was originally meant to be a 22-month mission, NASA said Tuesday.
The satellite carried with it the Cloud Profiling Radar, the first W-band radar to be operated in space. The radar was powered down for the last time in December.
The mission offered superior sensitivity compared to ground-based weather radars, generating 3D slices of cloud layers and helping scientists better understand and achieve key discoveries about weather systems and the climate.
Issues concerning the spacecraft’s battery and the mechanism controlling the spacecraft’s orientation repeatedly threatened to end the mission but CloudSat team members were able to offer solutions.
Deborah Vane, the CloudSat project manager at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, touted the dedication and talent of the agency’s personnel, saying, “We recovered from these anomalies with techniques that no one has ever used before.”
