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Like most spacecraft, ESA's Integral mission launched with a 'safe mode'. When the satellite experiences a potentially major issue, this mode kicks into action and switches off all but the spacecraft's most basic functions, while rotating it to ensure its solar arrays are pointing towards the Sun and the spacecraft is charging.
Integral's safe mode, however, relied on the spacecraft's thrusters, which fired for the last time in 2020.
Since then, the Integral team at ESA's ESOC mission control centre have been working on a new safe mode capable of rescuing the spacecraft without the need for thrusters using a clever combination of rerouting some of the 20-year-old spacecraft's existing systems and introducing new software developed more than two decades after the mission launched.