The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had been trying to communicate with the Advanced Land Observing Satellite "DAICHI" (ALOS) for about three weeks after it developed a power generation anomaly; however, we decided to complete its operations by sending a command* at 10:50 a.m. on May 12 (Japan Standard Time) as we found it was impossible to recover communication with the satellite.
DAICHI, launched on January 24, 2006 (JST), 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 would like to express our profound appreciation to all pertinent organizations and personnel for their cooperation with our DAICHI operations. JAXA continues to investigate the causes of the power generation anomaly based on the data we have acquired from the satellite, and will report the result to the Space Activities Commission of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.
