Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC July 16, 1998

(Phone: 202/358-1727)

Jim Sahli
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301/286-0697)

Franco Bonacina
European Space Agency Headquarters, Paris, France
(Phone: 33-1-5369-7713)

RELEASE: 98-125

EFFORTS TO RECOVER SOHO SPACECRAFT CONTINUE AS

INVESTIGATION BOARD FOCUSES ON MOST LIKELY CAUSES

NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) engineers, reasoning

that over the next two-to-three months the spacecraft's solar
panels will increasingly face the Sun and generate power, are
continuing their efforts to contact the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.

Meanwhile, the NASA/ESA investigation board concentrates

its inquiry on three errors that appear to have led to the
interruption of communications with SOHO on June 24. Officials
remain hopeful that, based on ESA's successful recovery of the
Olympus spacecraft after four weeks under similar conditions in
1991, recovery of SOHO may be possible.

The SOHO Mission Interruption Joint ESA/NASA Investigation

Board has determined that the first two errors were contained in
preprogrammed command sequences executed on ground system
computers, while the last error was a decision to send a command
to the spacecraft in response to unexpected telemetry readings.
The spacecraft is controlled by a joint ESA/NASA Flight Operations
Team, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.

The first error was in a preprogrammed command sequence

that lacked a command to enable an onboard software function
designed to activate a gyro needed for control in Emergency Sun
Reacquisition (ESR) mode. ESR mode is entered by the spacecraft
in the event of anomalies. The second error, which was in a
different preprogrammed command sequence, resulted in incorrect
readings from one of the spacecraft's three gyroscopes, which in
turn triggered an Emergency Sun Reacquisition.

At the current stage of the investigation, the board believes

that the two anomalous command sequences, in combination with a
decision to send a command to SOHO to turn off a gyro in response
to unexpected telemetry values, caused the spacecraft to enter a
series of Emergency Sun Reacquisitions, and ultimately led to the
loss of control.

The efforts of the investigation board are now directed at

identifying the circumstances that led to the errors, and at
developing a recovery plan should efforts to regain contact with
the spacecraft succeed.
 ESA and NASA engineers believe the spacecraft is currently
spinning with its solar panels nearly edge-on towards the Sun, and
thus not generating any power. Since the spacecraft is spinning
around a fixed axis, as the spacecraft progresses in its orbit
around the Sun, the orientation of the panels with respect to the
Sun should gradually change. The orbit of the spacecraft and the
seasonal change in the spacecraft-Sun alignment should result in
the increased solar illumination of the spacecraft solar arrays
over the next few months. The engineers predict that in late
September 1998 illumination of the solar arrays and, consequently,
power supplied to the spacecraft, should approach a maximum. The
probability of successfully establishing contact reaches a maximum
at this point. After this time, illumination of the solar arrays
gradually diminishes as the spacecraft-Sun alignment continues to
change.

In an attempt to recover SOHO as soon as possible, the Flight

Operations Team is uplinking commands to the spacecraft via NASA's
Deep Space Network, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, CA, approximately 12 hours per day with no success to
date. A recovery plan is under development by ESA and NASA to
provide for orderly restart of the spacecraft and to mitigate
risks involved.

The recovery of the Olympus spacecraft by ESA in 1991 under

similar conditions leads to optimism that the SOHO spacecraft may
be recoverable once contact is re-established. In May 1991, ESA's
Olympus telecommunications satellite experienced a similar major
anomaly which resulted in the loss of attitude, leading to
intermittent power availability. As a consequence, there was
inadequate communication, and the batteries and fuel froze. From
analysis of the data available prior to the loss, there was
confidence that the power situation would improve over the coming
months.

A recovery plan was prepared, supported by laboratory tests,

to assess the characteristics of thawing batteries and
propellants. Telecommand access of Olympus was regained four
weeks later, and batteries and propellant tanks were thawed out
progressively over the next four weeks. The attitude was then
fully recovered and the payload switched back on three months
after the incident. Equipment damage was sustained as a result of
the low temperatures, but nothing significant enough to prevent
the successful resumption of the mission. The experience of
Olympus is being applied, where possible, to SOHO and increases
the hope of also recovering this mission.

Estimating the probability of recovery is made difficult by a

number of unknown spacecraft conditions. Like Olympus, the
hydrazine fuel and batteries may be frozen. Thermal stress may
have damaged some of the scientific instruments as well. If the
rate of spin is excessive, there may have been structural damage.
SOHO engineers can reliably predict the spacecraft's orbit through
November 1998. After that time, the long-term orbital behavior
becomes dependent on the initial velocity conditions of the
spacecraft at the time of the telemetry loss. These are not known
precisely, due to spacecraft thruster activity that continued
after loss of telemetry, so orbital prediction becomes very
difficult.

Summing up the scientific returns from SOHO, which

completed its two-year primary mission in April, Dr. George
Withbroe, NASA's Director of the Sun-Earth Connections science
program at NASA Headquarters said, "In the last two years, SOHO
revolutionized our understanding of the Sun in many ways. It was
a unique set of instruments devoted to the study of the most
important star to us on Earth -- our Sun -- and we are very
hopeful that the project engineers will be able to return this
world-class observatory to science operations again."

More information on SOHO, including status reports, is

available on the internet at:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

or via the new ESA science website at:

http://sci.esa.int/

-end-