NASA‘s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is a satellite the space agency launched in 2008, while SpaceX was still taking its first steps in the launch industry. Its job is to keep an eye on the boundaries of the solar system. It tracks energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) formed when solar winds meet the colder winds of interstellar space.

It’s an important job. Unfortunately, IBEX stopped doing it a while ago. Something went wrong with the fifteen-year-old probe that forced the space agency to reset it. This has happened before. Only, this time, IBEX failed to reestablish communication.

NASA uses the firecode

If you were to lose contact with a drone over the ocean, odds are you’re just going to write it off. It’s never coming back. But an object orbiting the planet at a distance of between 7,000 and 221,000 kilometres? Yeah, that’s totally recoverable. Provided it’s close enough to the planet to allow it.

On 2 March this year, IBEX swung close enough to Earth to make it possible. The American space agency performed an operation called a firecode (or external) reset earlier this month. Basically, NASA tried turning it off and on again. The probe was scheduled to conduct an autonomous reset a couple of days later but NASA decided not to waste the opportunity and managed to recover its probe.

“After the firecode reset, command capability was restored. IBEX telemetry shows that the spacecraft is fully operational and functioning normally,” said the agency. That’s not bad going for a mission that was only expected to last until 2010. The probe will continue to monitor how the Sun interacts with our Solar System’s heliosphere until its next reset is required, at least.

Source: NASA via The Register