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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 28, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: NASA’S SOLAR OBSERVATORY WAKES UP

by Hazed

In October 2015, NASA lost contact with one of its solar observatories, the STEREO-B spacecraft. Now, after 22 months of work, they’ve managed to revive its comms.

The Deep Space Network, which NASA uses to track and communicate with missions throughout space, established a lock on the STEREO-B’s downlink carrier a few days ago. The Missions Operation team spent several hours using the signal to figure out what’s going on with the craft, then powered it down to save battery power.

The STEREO-B is part of a pair, operating in conjunction with the STEREO-A. The A ship flies ahead of Earth’s orbit, and the B craft trails behind. They were part of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission to provide stereo measurements of the sun, so scientists could study giant solar flares called coronal mass ejections. The two spacecraft were launched in 2006 and designed to last two years, but scientists decided to keep the mission going as long as data was being sent back. STEREO-A has continued to operate, while STEREO-B failed.

The cause of the original loss of communications is ironic – it happened when the team were testing what would happen when the spacecraft lost communications! What was supposed to happen was that if the spacecraft didn’t receive any communications from Earth for 72 hours it was supposed to do a hard reset. The test was necessary to prepare for a solar conjunction, which is when the sun blocks STEREO-B’s line of site to Earth.

The team will continue with further recovery processes and hope to re-stablish attitude control and to evaluate all the subsystems and instruments.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-establishes-contact-with-stereo-mission
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/nasa_reconnects_with_lost_floating_spacecraft/

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