DSCOVR not to come back online until early 2020

Sunday, 13 October 2019 15:23 UTC

DSCOVR not to come back online until early 2020

As we have reported before, the real time solar wind monitoring satellite Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) which is located at the Sun-Earth L1 point is being kept in a safe hold at the moment. A glitch in its position system triggered the safe hold and that means it does not transmit any data back to Earth. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel for DSCOVR.

In a statement issued on 30 September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated that that it is working with NASA and an unnamed company on a software update to restore DSCOVR. “Engineers report that intermediate test results of the software fix have been positive and they expect it to be incorporated during the first quarter of calendar year 2020.”

DSCOVR has been in safe hold since 27 June, which is well over 3 months ago. With NOAA's statement in mind we can conclude that we will likely be without DSCOVR for at least three more months. The much older Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite is now our primary source for real time solar wind data and will continue to be our primary source for the foreseeable feature. We wish the entire team working on the issue that plagues DSCOVR good luck with their progress and hope to see DSCOVR back online as soon as possible.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

Thank you for reading this article! Did you have any trouble with the technical terms used in this article? Our help section is the place to be where you can find in-depth articles, a FAQ and a list with common abbreviations. Still puzzled? Just post on our forum where we will help you the best we can! Never want to miss out on a space weather event or one of our news articles again? Subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and download the SpaceWeatherLive app for Android and iOS!

Latest news

Support SpaceWeatherLive.com!

A lot of people come to SpaceWeatherLive to follow the Sun's activity or if there is aurora to be seen, but with more traffic comes higher server costs. Consider a donation if you enjoy SpaceWeatherLive so we can keep the website online!

23%
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/02/22X6.3
Last M-flare2024/03/18M6.6
Last geomagnetic storm2024/03/03Kp6- (G2)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
February 2024124.7 +1.7

This day in history*

Solar flares
12003M5.34
22003M2.33
32000M2.29
42003M2.23
52003M2
ApG
1200137G3
2200638G2
3200219G1
4201526G1
5200511G1
*since 1994

Social networks