Jul 27 1998
From The Space Library
NASA announced that astronomers had located the "wayward" SOHO satellite after losing radio contact on 24 June, when a programming error on the ground caused its solar panels to switch positions. Two U.S. radio telescopes had located the satellite rotating slowly near its original position, approximately 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth. Engineers had calculated its exact location after NASA's Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California, "intercepted the echo of a radio signal transmitted by the giant radio telescope of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in Arecibo, Puerto Rico." The spacecraft's slow rotation on its axis indicated that it had incurred only minor damage and that its solar panels would soon face the Sun again.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31