A disabled satellite that tracks space weather is back online after nine months of efforts to get it communicating with Earth, according to a U.S. government update.
The nearly five-year-old Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) went into a safe mode lockdown on June 27, 2019, due to issues with the attitude control system that keeps it properly oriented in space to receive commands and send data.
Engineers at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) created a flight software patch and uploaded it recently to the satellite, NOAA officials said Monday (March 2). This allowed DISCOVR to resume its observations of space weather, or the area in Earth's vicinity affected by the sun's variability.
Related: The DSCOVR Mission in Photos
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Media reports in October hinted such a fix was coming early in 2020, but did not give any information on why it took several months to implement the correction.
Since the sun regularly sends charged particles towards our planet, monitoring its activity is crucial to protecting satellites and other infrastructure vulnerable to the periodic "solar storms" the sun emits, when during times of high activity it sends coronal mass ejections of particles towards Earth.
While a backup satellite (NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer) was used to keep space weather updates flowing, and there are many other satellites monitoring the sun, a senior official at NOAA said he was pleased that DSCOVR is contributing once again to the fleet.
"Bringing DSCOVR operational again shows the unique skills and adaptability of our ... engineers, and the care we are taking to get the maximum life from an aging asset," Steve Volz, assistant NOAA administrator for its satellite and information service, said in the statement.
DSCOVR orbits at a Lagrange point — a relatively stable "parking spot" in space
between the Earth and the sun, allowing the spacecraft to obtain spectacular full-disc views of our planet. The spacecraft is designed for five years, but engineers typically try to squeeze more life out of older missions to save on the cost and complication of launching replacements.
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