NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft, which launched in 2006 to study the sun, is finally passing by Earth again after a 17-year orbit around the star.
For nearly 17 years, NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A spacecraft drifted through space on a lonely mission. It traveled around the sun far ahead of Earth, conducting groundbreaking research on theLike many NASA spacecraft, STEREO-A outlived its mission life span of two years. Instead, it traveled further and further away from Earth on a journey that became fraught with uncertainty as it passed behind the sun in 2015, temporarily severing contact with NASA.
But STEREO-A kept going. And its orbital trajectory around the sun meant that it had a chance to do what very few other NASA spacecraft could: eventually make its way back toward home. That came to fruition earlier this month, when STEREO-A passed between the sun and the Earth for the first time since its launch in 2006, NASA. The flyby marked a milestone for the spacecraft and the team that has monitored its progress — and a chance for STEREO-A to prove its relevance almost two decades later. As it continues to pass by Earth, STEREO-A will be used to perform new research on the sun, aided by newer NASA satellites that have been developed since its launch.
The two STEREO spacecraft launched in October 2006 with an ambitious mission: to generate a 360-degree view of the sun by observing the star from two vantage points as they circled it on orbits that diverged from the Earth in opposite directions. STEREO-A maneuvered into an orbit around the sun ahead of Earth, and STEREO-B began circling the sun in the opposite direction behind the Earth.
The difference in perspective was groundbreaking, Guhathakurta said. Earthbound instruments can only ever observe one Earth-facing slice of the sun at a time, while the rest of the rapidly changing solar surface remains obscured. The twin STEREO spacecraft, from their offset positions, allowed scientists to“Seeing the sun from the front and from the far side at the same time — extraordinary,” she said. “We are on planet Earth, human beings, and we are achieving that.
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