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: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:19AM (1 child)
This. We are certainly talking about "enterprise" type software. The sort of stuff you would find on big back room servers. This kind of software often leaves backwards compatiblity in the dust, makes major changes in small point releases, quickly drops support for old versions, and keeps everything that interacts with it on a constant upgrade cycle. Feel glad if you have never had to deal with this kind of crap.
If you have Windows 10 32-bit loaded on your computers, you can still run some programs that compiled for Windows 1.0! Does anyone really think this satellite is running Windows? :P
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:17PM
Interesting point: if the satellite was assumed dead for many years, the ground based copies of the hardware were probably discarded. Now, if it were my space program I would insist on at least keeping a soft emulator available forever, regardless, but I'd bet that budgets don't provide enough overhead to include that kind of future maintenance capability assurance.
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