NASA and its partners ended the GRACE satellite mission this week after eight of 20 battery units in one of the paired satellites stopped working.
The satellites – GRACE-1 and GRACE-2 – worked in tandem to measure fractional changes in Earth’s gravity due to, among other things, the amount of groundwater in prominent aquifers.
Data obtained by the satellites helped deepen researcher’s understanding of agricultural water use. “They were paradigm-shifting measurements in understanding the earth system,” according to the project’s principal investigator, Byron Tapley of the University of Texas at Austin.