The European Space Agency’s Gravity and Ocean Circulation Experiment (GOCE), knocked out by a software glitch on 18 July, has resumed transmitting data to the ground.

“We’ve fixed the problem,” Reiner Rummel, chairman of the GOCE mission advisory group, told Nature this morning.

The good news comes earlier than expected. Mission scientists have worked hard during the last few weeks writing software to get GOCE’s board computer systems up and running again. However, few had hoped that the telemetry problem would be solved before the end of September.

During the recovery procedures GOCE’s orbit has been raised by about 9 kilometers. The mission team will now start lowering the satellite to its initial orbit 255 kilometres above ground which allows extremely accurate measurements of subtle gravity anomalies and geoid height.

GOCE could become fully operational again as early as next week, says Rummel.

Image: ESA – AOES Medialab