NASA Reconnects With 'Lost' STEREO-B Satellite (businessinsider.com)

NASA lost contact with its STEREO-B spacecraft twenty-two months ago during a routine 72-hour test. On Sunday, the spacecraft reconnected with NASA roughly 189 million miles away from Earth. While that would seem like a cause for celebration, "the very hard and scary work is just the beginning, says Stereo project scientist Joe Gurman, as the agency has to turn on the computer to learn more about the current state of the spacecraft -- a process that may make the craft lose contact with them again. Slashdot user bongey writes: NASA may have only two minutes or less to fix a STEREO-B satellite before the computer causes it to lose contact again. NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly twenty-two months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientists are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again. A more detailed technical summary can be found here. "We have something like two minutes between when STEREO-B receives the command to boot up one of its computers and when it starts doing what we don't want it to do," Gurman said. Business Insider writes, "Making matters worse, it takes about 20 seconds to send commands to the spacecraft -- a data rate that makes a dial-up modem seem lightning fast."

Comments

What a read.

[thegarbz]

This is the kind of stuff that is truly exciting to an engineer interested in space. A satellite in an uncontrolled spin due to a bad inertial unit, without enough power in its batteries to transmit at full power, a network of deep space communications satellites colliding signals to create constructive interference to boost communications, a plan to point several radio telescopes towards it in the hope to hear something, sweeping the sky with different frequencies and if all else fails point the Hubble at it.

Combined with the short time window to make things work the only thing missing here is Matt Damon and you got yourself a summer blockbuster.