Amateur satellite enthusiast Scott Tilley was searching the sky for spy satellites to track when he discovered an unknown object. That object identified itself as the NASA IMAGE satellite, thought to have become non-operational in 2005. NASA has since confirmed that the satellite is indeed IMAGE, and is now planning on using it to observe the magnetosphere near the northern magnetic pole.
Another enthusiast, Cees Bassa, added his own detailed analysis of the error and how it recovered.
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NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, which was launched in 2000 and unexpectedly ceased operations in 2005, may still be operational and transmitting data:
After years in darkness, a NASA satellite is phoning home. Some 12 years since it was thought lost because of a systems failure, NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) has been discovered, still broadcasting, by an amateur astronomer. The find, which he reported in a blog post this week, presents the possibility that NASA could revive the mission, which once provided unparalleled views of Earth's magnetosphere.
The astronomer, Scott Tilley, spends his free time following the radio signals from spy satellites. On this occasion, he was searching in high-Earth orbit for evidence of Zuma, a classified U.S. satellite that's believed to have failed after launch. But rather than discovering Zuma, Tilley picked up a signal from a satellite labeled "2000-017A," which he knew corresponded to NASA's IMAGE satellite. Launched in 2000 and then left for dead in December 2005, the $150 million mission was back broadcasting. It just needed someone to listen.
After Tilley revealed the discovery, word rocketed around to former members of IMAGE's science team, says Patricia Reiff, a space plasma physicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who was a co-investigator on the mission. "The odds are extremely good that it's alive," Reiff says. There also appears to be data beyond telemetry in the signal, perhaps indicating some of the satellite's suite of six instruments are working.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:28AM
Not even the funny guy with the funny story fragments is commenting :(?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:49AM (3 children)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:49AM (2 children)
I watched a big aerospace company who had many years in satellite work lay off their engineers and toss their computer stuff when we got bought out by an investment company. The investment company seemed to have no idea how valuable our knowledge and databases of all our historical achievements were worth. If the stuff we sold to the Government broke now, I have no idea how they could ever fix it.
I may well have the only CAD system in existence that can still read the drawing files... as it was a proprietary system that required a dongle, and our group reversed the dongle code and removed it, as faster computers overwhelmed the dongle and it wouldn't work. Later the CRT went the way of the dodo, and this time I personally had to reverse some of the VGA board setup code so as to allow me to use a newer flat screen LCD monitor. Now, even that is going away as HDMI takes over, and I no longer will be able to configure that old program, running under DOS, to drive it.
If they want me to mess with it, they better be ready to pony up with 20 years lost salary and appropriate retirement. They apparently had no trouble paying for the Leadership Skills of the Manager to lay me off, nor did they have any trouble paying for the Organizational Skills of the Executive to hire the Manager that laid me off.
Each level gets paid what the person paying them thinks they are worth.
In big organizations, I often see the impediments are worth a helluva lot more than a doer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:16AM
I'm inclined to believe that you could get a palate of gear for the price of a Happy Meal which would contain at least 1 combination of old hardware that was still working and able to do the task.
...and FreeDOS has USB support, so maybe HDMI is a possibility in its future.
Cool (sad) story, nonetheless.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:27PM
Let's ignore the fact that there are millions of perfectly fine CRTs on the used market and will be for the forseeable future.
VGA is pretty simple as far as analog video goes, it is just component RGB (0.7Vpp) with separate 5V H and V sync signals (of varying polarity). With a minimum horizontal frequency of ~30KHz these video timings will be supported by all currently manufactured monitors (barring extremely specialised equipment).
There are lots of manufacturers of various scalers and video processors that work great if your monitor doesn't accept analog video at all. Otherwise it is straightforward to build your own adapters (usually all that is needed is to convert between the various sync formats, because the 0.7Vpp RGB is so ubiquitous).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:03AM (2 children)
Should it be a surprise that is hasn't re-entered the atmosphere and burned up after so many years of neglect?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:58AM
Only objects in an Low Earth Orbit will come down on their own within a reasonable time. Skylab, which was in a very low orbit (434x441) took about five years on it's own to come down from it's last visit, and I'm not sure how much the Apollo SMs boosted it on each visit. Anything high orbits or geostationary can stay up there for hundreds of years. It's why the FAA requires any craft heading to geostationary orbit reserve fuel to move to a graveyard orbit at it's planned end of service life.
IMAGE is considerably father out, and I'm not sure it experiences any appreciable atmospheric drag that it will come down within our lifetimes unaided.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:57PM
Satellites don't fall back to earth when they are not given any orders like the do in video games. Once you are out of the atmosphere, there is nothing stopping you.
The 2nd thing the US ever put in to orbit is still up there: Vanguard 1 [heavens-above.com]. It has at least a couple of hundred years to go.
IMAGE [heavens-above.com] is in a even higher orbit. IMAGE is several hundred times more massive (500kg vs 1.5kg) so that affects it, but its still probably has got centuries of orbit time left.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:51AM
It's actually been known to happen that satellites will sometimes spontaneously resurrect. The poster child of this is probably ham radio's AMSAT-7, launched 1974, died 1981, officially confirmed alive in 2002 and still going as of today, but it was apparently semi-functional throughout the late 80s/mid 90s, as it was used in resistance against Polish anti-communists.
The damn thing is so old the FCC actually had to issue a wavier to allow hams to talk to it as its Mode B transponder actually operates on frequencies disallowed these days.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/27/184214 [soylentnews.org]
Three dupes in a week.
If editors didn't usually do a great job, we wouldn't notice a moment of sloppiness. Setting the bar too high, or something...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday February 02 2018, @01:58AM
followup != dupe
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]