NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) mission was launched in 2000 and successfully operated for more than five year. The mission addressed three broad science questions that lie at the heart of our efforts to understand the geospace environment and its response to the solar wind: (i) What are the dominant mechanisms for injecting plasma into the magnetosphere on the time scales of substorms and geomagnetic storms? (ii) What is the directly driven response of the magnetosphere to changes in the solar wind? (iii) How and where are magnetospheric plasmas energized, transported, and lost during geomagnetic storms and magnetospheric substorms?

IMAGE mission significantly advanced our knowledge of the terrestrial magnetosphere, the region of space near the Earth where many TV-broadcasting, communications, and navigation  spacecrafts operate.