On Wednesday, NASA announced one of the instrument payload aboard that NASA's $916 million Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite has failed following the collection of only a couple of months of data. When weeks of troubleshooting didn't succeed in recovering the sensor, NASA made this announcement.

But the radar was a major part of what set NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's SMAP mission different from other present satellites. It can measure soil moisture on a global scale. Scientists, studying what drives Earth's water cycle and climate, can get a lot of benefit from such data. Besides them, farmers and forecasters who worry over droughts and floods will also get a lot of tangible benefits from it.

In a NASA press release, Dara Entekhabi, SMAP Science Team lead at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, said, "Although some of the planned applications of SMAP data will be impacted by the loss of the radar, the SMAP mission will continue to produce valuable science for important Earth system studies".

The radar used to function by transmitting pulses toward the surface of Earths from SMAP's orbit 685 kilometers (426 miles) up and formed the 'active' part of the mission. The passive radiometer continuously listens for natural microwave emissions from the planet.

Head of NASA's Earth science division, Michael Freilich, mentioned the SMAP spacecraft gathered maps of global soil moisture at quite lower resolution while operating in radiometer-only mode.