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NASA Confirms: Its Undead Satellite is Operational
Late last month, news broke that a satellite sleuth had spotted what appeared to be a lost NASA probe alive and sending out data. Now, NASA has officially confirmed the identity of the satellite as the IMAGE orbiter and is in the process of restoring the capability of processing the data that it is sending down. While we don't yet know whether any of its instruments are operational, one of its original team members is arguing that the hardware can still produce valuable science.
And NASA has determined that the craft's return to life is even more mysterious than we'd realized. When IMAGE originally lost contact, it was using its backup hardware after the primary set shut down. Upon its return, IMAGE is using its primary hardware again.
For those interested in all the details of the saga, NASA has put up a page where it's posting updates on its attempts to revive the satellite. In late January, the Goddard Flight Center was given time on NASA's Deep Space Network to have a listen to the craft. By the end of the month, the agency confirmed that this was indeed IMAGE and started trying to produce a software environment that could process the data it was sending.
"The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Center no longer exist," NASA's Miles Hatfield wrote, "and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering."
Maybe NASA could make the raw feeds and existing specs available on the internet and let some of us have at it? Offer a bounty to the first folks who can demonstrate a program that can properly decode it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:26PM
Probably a combination of mission control alterations over the years, software upgrades (possibly including elimination of old hardware, like sparc or power, etc that other projects didn't use), and ~12 years of related changes without the expectation that this collection of software would be needed in this configuration again.
Keep in mind most NASA hardware is purpose-built. This means the radio frequencies, the hardware stack, and the software stack may all be dramatically different for a particular satellite, probe, or other piece of extraterrestrial tech. When you combine this with a piece of hardware that was DECLARED LOST over a decade ago, it is not at all unsurprising that the hardware might have been sold/recycled/replaced either due to failure or obsolescence and the software relegated to a take-home memory or far corner of a storage warehouse somewhere for which the paperwork may have become corrupted/incomplete.
While I would like to believe bureaucracy was better at filing and storing things for long periods of time, NASA just as often has things recovered thanks to recyclers/junk dealers as it does thanks to internal staff itself.