NASA’s LDEF: A 69-Month Orbit Turns Into A Treasure Trove Of Space Weather
NASA’s Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), launched in 1984 for a planned 10 months, remained in orbit for 69 months due to scheduling changes and the Challenger aftermath; retrieved by Space Shuttle Columbia in January 1990 with 57 experiments, it provided an unusually long record of how materials and surfaces endure the space environment, including exposure to micrometeoroids, atomic oxygen, radiation and debris, enabling researchers to refine models of the orbital environment.