The joint ESA/NASA Ulysses mission aimed to study the heliosphere as a function of the solar latitude. The spacecraft was launched from the US space shuttle on October 1990. The spin-stabilized spacecraft had a mass of approximately 370 kg at launch. It used the gravitational field of Jupiter (February 8, 1992) to swing out from the ecliptic plane and reach a solar polar orbit of inclination 80.2° at a distance varying from 1.34 to 5.4 AU that it covered in around 6.5 years. The power supply weakening and the ground station becoming unavailable, on June 30, 2009, the agencies stopped the mission after 18 years and 246 days of operations.