It was developed by Japan's ISAS in association with the United States' NASA, and was launched by a Delta II rocket on 24 July 1992 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The primary purpose of the mission was to study the structure and dynamics of the tail region of the magnetosphere with a comprehensive set of scientific instruments.

[2] This problem was solved by changing the trajectory of the craft during a lunar flyby that took place on 26 September 1993 so that it passed through the shadow of the Moon.

[2] The apogee was lowered down to 50 R🜨 in mid November 1994 and then to 30 R🜨 in February 1995 in order to study substorm processes in the near-Earth tail region.

[5] Geotail, WIND, Polar, SOHO, and Cluster were all part of the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics Science Initiative (ISTP) project.