Article Posted on : - May 13, 2011

Artist's concept of Japan's Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS), also known as Daichi. Photo: JAXA.

TOKYO (BNS): Japan's Advanced Land Observing Satellite "DAICHI" (ALOS) has lost all its connection with JAXA, the nation’s space agency announced Thursday.

The satellite has lost it communication with the agency three weeks back due to the presence of a power generation anomaly.

DAICHI was launched on January 24, 2006, and it had been operated for over five years, which was its target life and well beyond its design life of three years, and it achieved many fruitful results related to earth observations.

"We decided to complete its operations by sending a command from the ground to halt its onboard transmitter and batteries at 10:50 a.m. on May 12 (Japan Standard Time), as we found it was impossible to recover communication with the satellite," JAXA officials said in a statement.

The satellite has been developed to contribute to the fields of mapping, precise regional land coverage observation, disaster monitoring, and resource surveying.

JAXA will continue to investigate the causes of the power generation anomaly, the officials said.