Cluster celebrates its 10th anniversary

Launched on 16 July 2000, the European satellites Salsa and Samba were joined in Earth orbit on 9 August of the same year by their counterparts Rumba and Tango. And so began an unprecedented study of the magnetic field that surrounds our planet. The four satellites fly in a varying formation (the distance separating them going from 100 to 10,000 km) and move as far as 125,000 km away from the Earth (the shortest distance being 25,500 km). As a result of this very special flight configuration, the Cluster mission has already gathered new data which, amongst other things, makes it possible to get a better understanding of how aurora borealis and aurora australis are formed under the influence of solar winds interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field.

Article from the European Space Agency

Cluster mission website (ESA)

Cluster on the CNES’ scientific website

Cluster on Wikipedia

Published on 19 July 2010

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