After floating aimlessly through the vacuum of space somewhere on the far side of the sun for nearly two years, a lost spacecraft is now finally sending messages back to Earth. “Over 22 months, the STEREO team has worked to attempt contact with the spacecraft,” NASA’s Karen Fox said on Monday. STEREO-B and twin spacecraft STEREO-A, which are together part of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, were launched in opposite directions from Earth in 2006. That’s a period of about 15 weeks on the ahead spacecraft, and 9 weeks on the behind spacecraft,” he explained. By late 2015, the NASA team had set aside several hours each week devoted to finding STEREO-B.

Source: National Post August 23, 2016 16:15 UTC