Over the past decades there have been many unfortunate instances of spacecrafs going missing and it is hardly ever possible to retrieve them, however in a recent development, NASA have been able to get in touch with a spacecraft that had gone missing two years ago. It is a story that is not only bizarre but also heartwarming.
According to a report on Gizmodo, "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. However, on Sunday night, scientists were able to reestablish contact, after 22 months of searching, when the Deep Space Network (NASA's tool for tracking space missions) was able to lock on to the signal. In October 2006, STEREO-B and its partner STEREO-A embarked on a two-year-long mission to provide measurements of the sun's flow of energy to Earth. One was slightly inside Earth's orbit, and one was outside, allowing scientists to measure energy from multiple angles and eventually, the far side of the sun for the first time. However, the team ran into a problem. One of the spacecraft was about to drift to the opposite side of the sun from Earth, so there was going to be a three-month period during which communication would be impossible. Since the spacecraft were only designed to be in space for two years, this development was overlooked at the time of the launch."
Dan Ossing, manager of the STEREO mission said, "The sun emits strongly in nearly every wavelength, making it the biggest source of noise in the sky.Most deep space missions only have to deal with sun interference for a day or so, but for each of the STEREO spacecraft, this period lasted nearly four months." The report further went on to add, "Because the spacecraft was designed to reset after 72 hours without contact, the team decided to test it to make sure it could reestablish a signal with Earth durimg this reset period. The scientists figured it would turn itself back on.The team received a weak signal after the first reset, and that was the last time they heard from STEREO-B. Until this week, when the Deep Space Network established a link with STEREO-B's signal." It is without doubt one of the most heartwarming stories to have come out of NASA in the recent days.
