Wednesday, 24 August 2016

Lost Spacecraft found after 22 months

It's almost around 22 months that NASA lost its contact with one of the valuable spacecraft STEREO-B. Atlast they found it. The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory Craft commonly called as Stereo-B lost the contact in October 2014. The latest attempt of finding the probe was a month operation using NASA's Deep Space Network. It tracks and communicates with the mission throughout space and was able to lock the STEREO-B's downlink carrier. Once it was in contact they started the process to find the details of the current condition of the craft such that how it was working. Probably the next step will be to assess the observatory health and examining whether the systems and instruments are working or not. STEREO-A has been working such that its providing stereoscopic measurements to study the Sun and Space weather including coronal mass ejections also known as Solar flares. Actually both spacecraft was launched in October 2006 designed for two years mission but as with so many probes of NASA they lasted for a longer time. Both are capable of giving a huge information of Sun and it's influence on Solar System.  In the middle of testing they lost the connectivity from STEREO -B. Even the signal was little weak just given a hint of what happened that's it. It's still unknown what's happened to the craft in this 22 months.

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