The new orbit of 1,323.4 kilometers in altitude — some 12.6 kilometers lower than the former position — will permit ground controllers to operate Jason-1 until it fails completely, as this altitude is considered low enough to serve as a graveyard orbit, officials said.
The lower position means Jason-1 will not clutter the more-useful operational orbit in the event it fails without warning. It also reduces the number of years it will take before atmospheric drag pulls it into a destructive re-entry once it is retired.
Jason-1 was launched in December 2001 on what was supposed to be a three-year mission to succeed the larger U.S.-French Topex-Poseidon satellite.
Ocean altimetry’s popularity with civil and military customers has only grown since then.
Jason-2 was launched in August 2008, and has been operated in tandem with Jason-1 to increase the frequency of altimetry data returned to users. Jason-3 is scheduled for launch in 2014 and a successor satellite to that is being designed by the 19-nation European Space Agency.
The U.S.-French Jason operating team said Jason-1, whose payload instruments were switched on starting April 24 after a seven-week outage, should be able to perform partial service for at least another year.
“The move from the altimetry reference orbit has been a difficult decision to take, but it also signals the start of an exciting new chapter in the extraordinary mission of Jason-1,” the Jason-1 team from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the French space agency, CNES, said in an April 23 message to users.
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