Welcome back DSCOVR!

Monday, 2 March 2020 20:39 UTC

On 27 June 2019, DSCOVR was placed into a “safe hold” due to problems with the satellite’s attitude control system. This “safe hold” mode meant that DSCOVR was not sending any scientific data back to Earth anymore. NASA and NOAA engineers worked hard over the past 9 months to develop a software patch to restore DSCOVR's operations which were successfully implemented according to NOAA officials.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite is of vital importance for everyone with an interest in space weather as it is the primary source of real time solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field data. This data is vital to predict the geomagnetic and auroral activity on our planet. DSCOVR is located at the Sun-Earth L1 point which means it always sits between the Sun and Earth, alerting us of the incoming solar wind and its properties.

The past few months we had to rely on the data from the aging Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite which is 22 years old. We were lucky that ACE still functions and could be used as a backup during the past 9 months but its great to have DSCOVR back which should bring us more accurate data with fewer errors. Welcome back DSCOVR and congratulations to the entire DSCOVR team for bringing DSCOVR back online!