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Amateur Finds Lost NASA Satellite

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:10AM   
from the its-not-aliens dept.

In a followup submission to a previous story, Thexalon writes:

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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Original Submission

• Can't actually communicate with it, however Can't actually communicate with it, however (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:49AM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @04:49AM (#631347)

  NASA Has Lost the Hardware & Software Needed to Talk to IMAGE Satellite [theregister.co.uk]

  [After verifying that it was most likely IMAGE,] The Goddard boffins next need to undertake what the agency called "significant reverse-engineering" to capture and analyse the probe's communications.

  "The challenge to decoding the signal is primarily technical", the announcement explained. "The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Centre no longer exist, and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time."

  -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

• Re:Can't actually communicate with it, however Re:Can't actually communicate with it, however (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:49AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:49AM (#631367)

  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.

  Parent

  • ''as HDMI takes over'' (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:16AM (#631372)

    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]

    Parent

  • Re:Can't actually communicate with it, however (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:27PM (#631480)

    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.

    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).

    Parent