This is an artist's depiction of the Earth's magnetosphere.
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Courtesy of NASA
NASA Will IMAGE the Magnetosphere (Updated!)
News story originally written on March 27, 2000
NASA successfully launched the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft on March 25, 2000. It took almost an hour to get the satellite into orbit around the Earth. So far, everything is working great.
"It's going great," said James Burch, Image's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Our orbit is perfect. We've turned on several systems on the spacecraft and we're getting data."
IMAGE will test its instruments for the next 40 days. The satellite was sent to study Earth's magnetosphere, which is directly affected by the solar wind.
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