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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Once considered lost, ESA and NASA's SOHO came back from the brink of death to work even better than it did before:

Welcome to the final episode in The Register's series on engineering longevity in space. We conclude with the joint ESA and NASA project, more than 24 years into a two-year mission: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Launched atop an Atlas II-AS from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 2 December 1995 at 08:08 UT, SOHO's prime scientific objectives are to investigate the outer layer and study the interior of the Sun as well as observe the solar wind.

[...] SOHO orbits the First Lagrangian Point (L1), lurking approximately 1.5 million kilometres from Earth and enjoys an uninterrupted view of the Sun. Its primary mission was supposed to last for two years but is now approaching the quarter-century mark.

However, it is not its extraordinary longevity for which SOHO is famous. It is for an almost mission-ending incident in 1998, the recovery from which cemented the probe's reputation as one of ESA's luckiest spacecraft, as well as one of its most long-lived.

Original Submission