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NASA has shut down its oldest spacecraft still delivering daily scientific
data. Launched in 1973, the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP8) measured
particles and magnetic fields it encountered while orbiting Earth at a distance
almost halfway to the Moon. The shutdown comes after the spacecraft’s
magnetometer failed last year. “The magnetometer was in many ways the most
important instrument,” says Joe King, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland. Data from the satellite was used in more than a thousand
research papers during its 28-year lifetime.