After an impressive 16 years in orbit, NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission has officially concluded. What started as a planned two-year study of Earth’s mysterious high-altitude, night-shining clouds has transformed into a treasure trove of scientific data with potentially far-reaching implications for understanding climate change and even space weather.
AIM’s mission was extended multiple times because of its valuable scientific insights. The mission has faced several hurdles, from software glitches to hardware errors. But NASA says the incredibly dedicated team kept the spacecraft running far, much longer than expected.
The affectionately nicknamed ‘the cloud watcher,’ AIM examined polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs). These enigmatic, shimmering clouds form 50 miles above Earth’s surface, right at the boundary of space. AIM’s mission was to unravel the reasons behind their variations in appearance and their link to a changing climate. Over the years, spacecraft have made pivotal discoveries, revealing how meteor remnants and rocket exhaust can seed these clouds and how earthly events can impact them.
Triumphs over adversity: AIM’s legacy
AIM’s path wasn’t with hurdles. Communication troubles plagued it early on, but brilliant engineers reprogrammed it to communicate via Morse code. After decreased performance over a few years, the spacecraft experienced a massive battery failure on March 13, 2023, after the initial decline in 2019.
The dedicated team made multiple attempts to keep the spacecraft powered, but the battery failure caused the mission to end with no further data collected. Despite this, they kept the mission alive through years of tireless effort.
“AIM was dedicated to studying the atmospheric region that borders between our atmosphere and space,” said AIM mission scientist Diego Janches of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “AIM’s help understanding this region has been of critical importance to providing insights on how the lower atmosphere affects space weather.”
“NASA’s AIM has been an incredibly successful mission,” said Scott Bailey, AIM principal investigator and professor at Virginia Tech. “It has answered core questions that have helped us understand how noctilucent clouds and atmospheric gravity waves vary over time and location.
Mission lives on
Though AIM’s watch has ended, the vast amount of data it collected is a gift that keeps giving. Scientists expect years of analysis to come, unlocking further secrets about the interplay between our atmosphere and the vastness of space.
“There are still gigabytes upon gigabytes of AIM data to study,” said Cora Randall, AIM deputy principal investigator. “And as our models and computational capabilities continue to improve, people will make many more discoveries using the AIM datasets.”
AIM achieved numerous significant discoveries during its mission, and the data it collected has already contributed to almost 400 peer-reviewed publications. These publications have revealed how meteor smoke and rocket exhaust can create clouds, how earthly events can impact them, and how high-altitude ice can cause strange radar echoes in specific regions of the atmosphere during the summer.
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