Yay!
NASA triumphs again! Seems a similar fix was carried out on Galileo and Curiosity.
The Deep Space Climate Observatory – a satellite that warns of incoming space storms that could knacker telecommunications on Earth – is up and running again after being shut down for eight months by a technical glitch. Launched in 2015 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the bird, known as DSCOVR for short, was sent into orbit …
Discovering the bug/problem, developing a solution and uploading it at that distance and getting it running without having to turn the phone satellite off and run out and reboot it is fantastic. Clearly NASA boffins are working a couple of dozen orders of magnitude above my mobile phone developers.
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"A flare hitting us at even 1/10 of light speed would be very bad."
On the other hand the Xray burst hitting us from a flare can do a fair amount of damage too - as I found out on 6 March 1989 when all layers of the ionosphere disappeared for a few hours
Dialling across the shortwave band (3-30MHz) and hearing nothing apart from the 20-odd transmitters tossing out a few kW apiece behind you is a _very_ spooky feeling - for 20 minutes we were convinced that WW3 had started and the ballistic incoming bad day devices would arrive in the southern part of the world shortly
It spooked the military too - last heady days of the Cold War remember - and is a LOT of the reason these birds as well as permanently monitored solar observatories now exist.
The CME hit earth a couple of days later and started raising various issues across the planet, but nothing compared with the spookiness of "WTF just happened" that warm and sunny cloudless autumn morning.
DSCOVR is meant to study the sun, including solar flares, which feed the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Flares are local to the Sun and do not reach Earth. But very strong flares are sometimes associated with Coronal Mass Ejections (and may cause them; the science is not clear).
The early warning system is not for solar flares but for Coronal Mass Ejections which take several days to reach Earth. These are known to cause blackouts and affect spacecraft.
As far as the isotope anomalies, the science is even less clear. I have heard theories of both massive CMEs and supernovae and there are undoubtedly others floating around.
Hope this helps.
“Bringing DSCOVR operational again shows the unique skills and adaptability of our NOAA and NASA engineers"
Quite a contrast in methodology and results vs. their supposed star contractor.