By Thursday afternoon, four years to the day after it left the Earth, the mission's lead scientist gave assurances that the craft was well on it way to achieving a stable orbit. This was the 13th time the craft and its team weathered tense times in its history of studying the sun. And because the $1 billion mission has been extended to 2003, it may not be the last.

Characterizing the past four years of the program, Bernhard Fleck, SOHO's lead scientist based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland said, "It has been exciting in all of its aspects.''

SOHO's mission is to study the relationship between the sun's core, its surface and its corona, as well as the solar winds, which are made up of charged particles. It will become increasingly important to study the sun's maximum activity -- the "solar max" -- when the sun has the highest occurrence of eruptions over its surface.

SOHO will return to duty Wednesday, said Pal Brekke, the project's deputy scientist. Fleck and Brekke agreed that the temporary shutdown was a small hiccup by comparison to a three-month period that started June 21, 1998. It is that period of time that still encapsulates the success and the failures of the NASA-European Space Agency project.

"It was a very awful sequence of events," Fleck said. "That was the toughest time in my career, in my life. It was a mad time."

On that fateful day in June, SOHO, about 933,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, failed to give any warning that it was in danger, simply going silent. Fleck and his team in Maryland had to wait a month before they could confirm whether there was a craft to even look for. Even then, there was only a slim chance the mission could be saved.

"Chances to recover the spacecraft, if you talked to me personally, were one in 100. Getting it back would take a miracle,'' Fleck said.

SOHO had not only just lost the ability to speak to its caretakers on Earth, it was rolling in such a way that its solar panels, used to power the on-board computer and instrument heaters, were not facing the sun. The craft effectively did not have a pulse, nor a means of resuscitation.

"We continuously asked the beast to turn on. Every day, we said, `Please turn on. Please turn on,'" Fleck said.

Fleck's desperation came not only from lack of contact with the craft, but also from the knowledge that certain equipment that should not be hit with direct sunlight was, by then, being cooked. And those systems that needed to be kept at room temperature were sitting in a -140 degrees Celsius environment.

Just as Earth progresses through the seasons, so did the satellite, making sunlight available to the solar panels, even though the craft could not change its orientation. SOHO's solar panels received enough sunlight to send a signal back to Earth on August 3.

"People got emotional. People were in tears. And I must say (I was, too), a little bit,'' Fleck said.

It would be another 16 days before the hydrazine fuel in its tank was thawed enough to fire up and stop the craft from rolling. Engineers were able to get SOHO into its correct orbit, cameras and solar panels facing the sun, on September 16, almost three months after it had lost contact.

In the "shake and bake" testing of the scientific components, performed here on Earth, the instruments crumbled, Fleck said. But in the end, only one gyroscope and one camera was lost through the whole ordeal.

"We scientists look down on engineers. But what they achieved was incredible,'' Fleck said. "The whole thing is a tribute to who built the spacecraft."

Fleck and project scientist Brekke said it was a miracle the SOHO mission has survived this long. He said all systems are "a go" for monitoring the sun's explosions to help warn satellite operators and power stations around the globe.

So while Thursday's four-year anniversary may have been a time for celebration, Fleck and Brekke instead chose to sit and watch the craft's status, waiting like expectant fathers, hoping for the craft to open its eyes and go to work again -- just one more time.