NASA just found a spacecraft that’s been lost for two years

STEREO-B, from the Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory mission, went missing on October 1, 2014 after losing contact with the team back on Earth.

Once a month, for the past 22 months, scientists have leveraged the power of the antennas in NASA’s Deep Space Network hoping for a sign from the missing STEREO-B spacecraft while its twin, STEREO-A, has continued to operate on its mission to study the sun. At the same time the last signal received on Earth showed that the probe was drifting in space with incorrect data about where it was headed. The craft lost contact after scientists tested its “command loss timer”, a hard reset function that was created to trigger if the craft didn’t make contact with Earth for 72 hours. One of the spacecrafts was due to go around the opposite side of the sun from Earth. Now they’ll be working on a way to give the spacecraft a checkup and get it back on track.

With the upcoming conjunction, the STEREO team put steps in place to prepare STEREO-A and STEREO-B (machines created to talk to the Earth every single day) for a almost four-month period of radio silence.

The spacecraft had apparently lost attitude control right before communication was lost.

The challenge now, said Gurman, is to upload some kind of fix to STEREO-B before it drains its feebly charged batteries. The DSN locked on to STERO-B’s signal at 6:27 p.m. EDT on Sunday. The STEREO-A spacecraft responded normally.

NASA re-establishes contact with long-lost spacecraft STEREO-B.

But before STEREO-B dipped out of range, they tested the reset system by withholding communication for three days.

After the hard reset, STEREO-B was supposed to power itself back on and send a status report to Earth. By 2014, the two STEREO spacecraft had drifted to the opposite side of the sun from the Earth, meaning that solar interference would cut off communications for several months.

On Sunday, NASA was met with good news when the space agency finally regained contact with the STEREO-B spacecraft.

STEREO-B was launched on October 26, 2006 from Space Launch Complex 17B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida atop a Delta II rocket along with its sister probe STEREO-A.

Despite nearly two years of silence, NASA never stopped searching for its long lost spacecraft STEREO-B. Stereoscopic images are made possible by sending multiple spacecrafts into different points along Earth’s orbit, but far away from Earth’s actual orbit, so they can take pictures of the sun that can’t be seen from Earth.

Image Credit: NASA ” The sun emits strongly, making it the biggest source of noise in the sky.