The IMAGE Spacecraft | The
FUV Instrument
SwRI's IMAGE Home Page | NASA's
IMAGE Home Page
May 3, 2004 -- After nearly four years of real-time displays, we have discontinued our processing of the Far UltraViolet (FUV) data from the IMAGE satellite. This has been an exciting and a successful effort to use data from a NASA research satellite to generate real-time test products for NOAA's space weather customers. NOAA is grateful to all of our interagency and international partners that have made this project a success. Note that IMAGE is still operating as an important science mission. Only the NOAA real-time products have been discontinued due to the gradual change in the satellite's orbit.
IMAGE is the first mission dedicated to "seeing" Earth's space
environment and watching solar activity drive space weather. IMAGE was launched
March 25, 2000. With its highly elliptical orbit, IMAGE obtained data on the
high-latitude northern hemisphere ionosphere and magnetosphere. Over time, the
orbit apogee precessed to lower latitudes, where it no longer obtains long coverage
each day of high-latitude auroral disturbances in the northern hemisphere.
The IMAGE satellite broadcasts its images of space weather in real time. Through
a partnership between NASA, NOAA, and the Communications Research Laboratory
(Japan), ground stations received the images and transfer them to the NOAA Space
Environment Center. The University of California,
Berkeley, NOAA/NESDIS in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Communications Research
Laboratory dedicated part of their available antenna tracking to the IMAGE satellite.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
the IMAGE instrument teams, and NOAA's Space Environment Center developed the
software that processed the real-time data and made the images available.
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