After 11 years and 53,500 orbits around our world, the Jason-1 satellite has been sentenced to death after losing its last transmitter. Jason-1 was an ocean altimetry satellite that blazed the trail for an unprecedented 20-plus-year record of our oceans' surface topographies.
Jason-1 was launched Dec. 7, 2001 by NASA and Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). It was initially only expected to last three to five years, but instead, the resilient satellite chugged along for over 11 years. NASA lost contact with Jason-1 on June 21, and the cause was subsequently found out to be irreparable damage to the satellite's sole remaining transmitter.
Jason-1 began its journey by overlapping with its predecessor Topex/Poseidon, launched in 1992, and winded its days down alongside its successor Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2, launched in 2008. Together, the three have collected some of the most important information on our world's oceans, including sea level, wind speed and wave height. Over 95 percent of the ice-free water on our planet was measured every 10 days.
"Jason-1 was an exemplary and multi-faceted altimeter mission and contributed so much to so many scientific disciplines," said Jean-Yves Le Gall, CNES president in Paris. "Not only did Jason-1 extend the precise climate record established by Topex/Poseidon, it made invaluable observations for mesoscale ocean studies on its second, interleaved orbit. Even from its 'graveyard' orbit, Jason-1 continued to make unprecedented new observations of the Earth's gravity field, with precise measurements right till the end."
"The mission met all of its requirements, performed an extended mission and demonstrated how a long-term climate data record should be established from successively launched satellites," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Since launch, it has charted nearly 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) of rise in global sea levels, a critical measure of climate change and a direct result of global warming. The Jason satellite series provides the most accurate measure of this impact, which is felt all over the globe."
The torch has now been completely passed on to Jason-2, which will hold it alone until NASA and CNES launch Jason-3 in 2015.
You can watch Jason-1's launch into space back in 2001 below: