Goddard Engineering and Technology Directorate

Emergency Recovery of ICESat-2

An artist’s rendering of ICESat-2. The satellite went into a safe hold following solar storms in May 2024, and is expected to return to science mode in mid-June.
An artist’s rendering of ICESat-2. The satellite went into a safe hold following solar storms in May 2024, and is expected to return to science mode in mid-June.

When the ICESat-2 spacecraft entered safe-hold following a seasonal solar array transition, the spacecraft’s GPS receiver turned off and the onboard navigation state was lost. The FDF provided an updated state vector and propagated ephemeris using both the pre-anomaly GPS data and tracking data provided by the Near-Earth Network. The ICESat-2 Flight Dynamics Engineer working in the MOC thanked the FDF for their critical assistance: “…we would have been dead in the water without the FDF.”