After losing communication with a space probe two years ago, NASA says it has reestablished contact.
NASA said it lost contact with the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories, known as the STEREO-B spacecraft, on Oct. 1, 2014, but that on Aug. 21, the Deep Space Network (DSN) established a link with the craft.
Contact with the probe was lost after a maneuver to try to prevent overheating of the ship’s antenna.
Two similar space probes are orbting the sun gathering information on solar weather.
STEREO-B is the sister craft to STEREO-A, both of which were launched in 2006 to study the sun and space weather. The spacecraft have contributed greatly to the understanding of coronal mass ejections, a bubble of super-heated gas and charged particles blasted into space from the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona.
STEREO-A is reportedly working normally.
NASA said it will now have to test STEREO-B to see how instrumentation and other sensors are operating after two years.
Both spacecraft are located on the other side of the sun from earth.