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WASHINGTON – A spacecraft common to both NASA and NOAA monitoring space weather conditions and providing images of the Earth has been offline for more than a week due to a problem related to its positioning system .
The Deep Space Climate Space Observatory, or DSCOVR, entered a "reserve" on 27 June, interrupting its scientific observations from its roost at the L-1 Lagrange Sun-Earth point, 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth towards the sun.
On July 5, NOAA spokesman John Leslie said engineers had put the spacecraft in a safe place to "diagnose first and then solve a technical problem in the system that maintains the position of the satellite". While this work is in progress, he said, the spacecraft does not return data.
Related: DSCOVR: The mission of observing the distant space on climate in images
The main mission of DSCOVR, launched in February 2015, is to monitor solar wind conditions, providing advance notice of weather events in the space. Although DSCOVR is in a safe place, Leslie said the NOAA Spatial Prediction Center would instead rely on Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft data and the solar observer. and heliophysics (SOHO), which, like the DSCOVR, are at the Earth-Sun L-1 position. point, as well as instruments on meteorological satellites in geostationary earth orbit.
DSCOVR has had a number of security deposits in the past, but these have generally lasted only a few hours. Engineers have speculated that these earlier backups had been caused by cosmic rays hitting the spaceship electronics. Leslie did not give a timetable for the resumption of normal DSCOVR operations.
Although DSCOVR's main mission is space weather monitoring, the vehicle is perhaps best known for a camera facing the Earth, called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). This camera takes full disk Earth images that can be used for global monitoring of atmospheric ozone and aerosols, as well as clouds and vegetation.
The EPIC goes back to the initial mission of the DSCOVR, more than 20 years ago. NASA proposed the mission, then called Triana, at the request of Vice President Al Gore, to provide this complete view of the Earth. The mission was put on hold soon in the administration of President George W. Bush, with the spacecraft warehoused. The Obama administration has resurrected the mission under the name of DSCOVR and with a new emphasis on monitoring space weather.
The Trump administration, however, has proposed to end the EPIC operations. NASA's budget requests for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 did not include any funding for EPIC, proposals that did not affect the overall mission of DSCOVR, funded by NOAA. Congress rejected these proposals, explicitly including the funding of DSCOVR operations in their final appropriation bills.
NASA has not repeated this effort to terminate the DSCOVR funding in its budget request for fiscal year 2020. The agency's budget proposal provided $ 1.7 million for DSCOVR operations, the same amount received in 2018.
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to cover all aspects of the space industry.
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