Overview

• Contact was lost on July 16 during a scheduled pass with ESA’s Cebreros station, and a second attempt via New Norcia also failed, indicating an onboard issue.
• Mission teams at ESOC and Airbus sent blind commands across a roughly 22‑minute round‑trip light time to reconfigure the communications system.
• A successful command reactivated the signal amplifier, restoring telemetry, and ESA reported the spacecraft in excellent condition with no failed systems.
• Engineers traced the outage to an internal counter that resets every 16 months, which coincided with the amplifier control function and left the transmitter off.
• During the Aug. 31 Venus gravity assist, the high‑gain antenna will serve as a thermal shield and remote sensing instruments will remain offline, with subsequent Earth flybys planned in 2026 and 2029 en route to Jupiter in July 2031.