BOULDER, COLORADO -- Scientific operation of a critical Sun-watching satellite has been regained after engineers devised patchwork solutions that include making use of more powerful ground radio dishes to reduce data losses. However, the on-going problem with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has put a crimp on using the one-of-a-kind spacecraft as a vital space weather forecasting tool.

In early July, ground engineers were also able to switch SOHO into a medium-rate telemetry mode, using the spacecraft's low-gain antenna. In medium-rate, all real-time science telemetry can be downlinked during station passes. However, relaying data stored by the spacecraft's on-board recorder is not possible in this mode.

Being able to transmit science data through the on-board low-gain antenna coupled to the 70-meter and 34-meter Deep Space Network stations is viewed as a way to curb total blackout periods for SOHO science data. That prospect, however, depends on availability of time in using already heavily subscribed antennas.

"Right now, I'm smiling," said Bernhard Fleck, European Space Agency SOHO Project Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We did a test which we've never done before since SOHO has been up thereusing the spacecraft's low-gain antenna to transmit high-rate science data."

Launched in 1995, SOHO is located one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. It orbits around a point in space -- called the L1 Lagrangian point -- a location where the combined gravity of the Earth and the Sun keep SOHO in an orbit locked to the Sun-Earth line.

SOHO is a project of international cooperation between the European Space Agency and NASA to study the Sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind.

SOHO scientists expect full high-rate telemetry coverage, even on 26-meter stations. To achieve this, they will roll the spacecraft 180 degrees around its Sun-pointing axis, a maneuver planned for July 8. Data losses from SOHO will still occur, but are minimized given Deep Space Network support, Fleck said.

"We usually don't have 24-hour coverage [of the Sun via SOHO]. We are not an operational mission. This is often overseen," Fleck said. "It was nice to hear how dearly we were missed when we were blacked out. But we are not dead yet. Considering where we were two weeks ago, we are in very good shape right now," he said.

Optimism aside, SOHO's general condition and data gaps are a worry for officials here at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center. They provide real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events. Also, the center provides national and worldwide warnings regarding solar disturbances that can affect people and equipment working in the space environment.

Forecasters depend on key SOHO instruments, particularly a white light coronograph, to provide round-the-clock looks of solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun. Bubbles or tongues of gas and magnetic field make up a coronal mass ejection. This matter speeds through space and can interact with the Earth's magnetic field. A frenzy of interference may be created, known to impact radio, television, and telephone signals, even disturb the navigation systems of ships and airplanes.

"It's a big deal. It's so operationally significant. There isn't any other white light chronograph that shows us when coronal mass ejections that are headed toward Earth occur," said Joseph Kunches Chief, Space Weather Operations at the Space Environment Center. "So without it for a little whilewell, you keep your fingers crossed. You hope the Sun doesn't know," he said.

Without the constant stream of SOHO data, "it isn't too far off the mark that our forecasting methodology would revert back to the way it was many years ago," Kunches told SPACE.com. "You'd be looking at a proxy for what you really want to know."

While SOHO scientists are attempting to increase the number of SOHO contacts and the length of contacts, around-the-clock operations are not expected, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist in the research and development branch of the Space Environment Center.

"From our space weather perspective, a once-a-day data dump from SOHO is useful. But it's a crapshoot. We'll need a solar event to go off at the right time, otherwise the information is completely lost. We won't have anything we can go back and look at," Biesecker said.

There is no question that SOHO is essential to solar and solar-terrestrial research and to space weather issues, said Louis Lanzerotti, consulting physicist at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Lanzerotti is editor of the American Geophysical Union's new journal that debuts this fall: Space Weather - The International Journal of Research and Applications.

"The detailed data on solar phenomena, especially solar coronal phenomena such as coronal mass ejections, have been invaluable in providing entirely new insights to such solar emissions that can affect critical technologies on Earth and in the space environment around Earth. There is no replacement at the moment for any potential loss of solar imaging data from SOHO," Lanzerotti told SPACE.com.