Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006, 9:05 AM ET (1405 GMT)
NASA has ended a six-year-old space science mission after the spacecraft suffered a fatal failure, the space agency announced late Friday. The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft, a NASA Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) mission, was launched into orbit in March 2000 to study the Earth's magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. The spacecraft, designed for a two-year primary mission, operated until December 2005, when it stopped responding to commands, apparently when its power subsystem failed.
