STEREO-B is one of NASA’s spacecraft that was lost on the other side of the Sun and continued efforts were being made since 1 October 2014 to re-establish contact with it.
This went all in vain until Sunday night, when STEREO-B finally contacted the solar observatory, which is an identical twin of another sun-monitoring robot.
In a statement by a NASA spokesperson Karen C. Fox, she confirmed that on Aug. 21, 2016, contact was reestablished with NASA’s STEREO-B (or Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories) spacecraft after communications were lost on 1 October 2014.
For 22 months, the team at NASA worked tirelessly to contact STEREO spacecraft. In a recent attempt, the team launched a monthly recovery operation using NASA’s Deep Space Network, or DSN, tracking and communicating with missions throughout space. This strategy worked, as the DSN established contact on the STEREO-B downlink carrier at 6:27pm EDT. The signal was then monitored by the Mission Operations team for several hours to calculate and estimate the location and attitude of the spacecraft.
The STEREO Missions Operations team will now look to further the recovery process and is now working on establishing the health, attitude control and other subsystems on the spacecraft.
The STEREO’s communications were blocked by the Sun as it drifted off to the other side, but now STEREO seems to work normally. Have anything to add to this article? Comment below!