NASA announced Monday it made contact with a $550 million deep space probe the space agency lost track of two years ago.
NASA was able to contact the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (STEREO-B) probe after 22 months of searching, establishing contact with the $550 million probe for several hours.
The STEREO-B probe was launched in 2006 to observe solar and space weather phenomena from deep space. The probe was lost in October 2014, but the probe was only supposed to remain operational for two years. The spacecraft was set to pass directly behind the sun right before it was lost.
“The STEREO Missions Operations team plans further recovery processes to assess observatory health, re-establish attitude control, and evaluate all subsystems and instruments,” NASA officials said in a press statement.
NASA is unsure STEREO-B is still functioning well enough to still be scientifically useful, but its sister spacecraft STEREO-A is functioning normally. The space agency will likely need to study STEREO-B with the Hubble Space Telescope to get it back in working order, which can’t happen until at least 2019 due to research schedules and orbital issues.
This is not the first NASA solar probe to be lost and found again. In 1998, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory lost contact with NASA, but was eventually reacquired.
NASA regularly finds new uses for old spacecraft as well. A mission launched in 2007 called Dawn was originally only intended to explore two asteroids, but the space agency was able to re-route the probe to visit a third in April.
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