spacetoday.net: GRACE Earth science mission ends

Posted: Sun, Oct 29, 2017, 11:46 AM ET (1546 GMT)
GRACE Earth science satellite illustration (NASA

NASA announced Friday that the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) Earth science mission had ended after problems with one of its two satellites. NASA said in a statement that battery problems on the GRACE-2 satellite kept it from producing enough power to operate its science instruments and transmitter for one final observing run. It and the GRACE-1 satellite will be deorbited by early next year. The GRACE mission, done jointly with the German space agency DLR, launched in 2002 for what was originally planned to be a five-year mission to measure variations in local gravity fields. Those variations allowed scientists to monitor movements of liquid water, ice, and the solid Earth. A next-generation mission, GRACE Follow-On, is scheduled for launch early next year.