In brief: NASA finds 'lost' spacecraft

Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - 11:03 StudyHall.Rocks

An artist's conception of the spacecraft viewing a sun storm.

Image: NASA.

After 22 months of silence, NASA has established contact with a spacecraft in orbit around the sun.

On Oct 1, 2014, the agency lost contact with one of its Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories, known as STEREO-B. Officials never stopped trying to contact the spacecraft and reconnected on Aug. 21, an agency news release said.
The STEREO mission includes two observatories -- one in orbit ahead of Earth and the other behind, according to NASA. The idea is to study coronal mass ejections [CMEs], which NASA defines as “powerful eruptions that can blow up to 10 billion tons of the sun's atmosphere into interplanetary space. Traveling away from the sun at speeds of approximately one million mph … CMEs can create major disturbances in the interplanetary medium and trigger severe magnetic storms when they collide with Earth's magnetosphere.”
These storms can damage or destroy satellites and are hazardous to astronauts involved in spacewalks. (See NASA’s homepage on STEREO.)
NASA scientists are working to assess the spacecraft’s condition.

RESEARCH MADE PUBLIC: NASA is making its research results public with a new portal opening access to scientific data.
Articles given at conferences or that appear in scholarly journals will be accessible to the public via the portal, PubSpace.
The space agency’s research often makes news, but the full publication is sometimes behind a pay wall. PubSpace will offer articles produced by NASA-funded research without a fee. Data will be available within a year of publication, according to the space agency.

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