NASA engineers were able to restore the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft by issuing an external command to restart it.

IBEX was put into emergency mode in February of this year after it stopped responding to commands uploaded by NASA engineers. After that, NASA waited until the spacecraft was at a minimum distance from Earth and launched an external team to reboot the satellite systems instead of waiting for the spacecraft to perform an autonomous reset. Currently, IBEX telemetry indicates that the spacecraft is fully operational and operating normally.

The “discoverer of the interstellar boundaries,” as the moon’s name suggests, was launched in 2008 to study the interaction of the solar wind with interstellar matter. Using data collected from the IBEX-Hi (to record high-energy particles and work in the 0.3 to 6 keV range) and IBEX-Lo (to record particles in the 0.01 to 2 keV range) sensors, astronomers are establishing the boundaries of Solar System systems.