PR 28-1998: SOHO spacecraft contacted
4 August 1998
Contact has been re-established with the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) following six weeks of silence. Signals sent yesterday through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) station at Canberra, Australia, were answered at 22:51 UT in the form of bursts of signal lasting from 2 to 10 seconds. These signals were recorded both by the NASA DSN station and the ESA Perth station. Contact is being maintained through the NASA DSN stations at Goldstone (California), Canberra and Madrid (Spain).Although the signals are intermittent and do not contain any data information, they show that the spacecraft is still capable of receiving and responding to ground commands. The slow process of regaining control of the spacecraft and restoring it to an operational attitude will commence immediately, with attempts to initiate data transmissions in order to perform an initial assessment of the spacecraft on-board conditions.
Last Update: 1 September 2019