By Brian Santo, contributing writer
It’s not every day that you find a missing satellite. On the other hand, how often does someone lose one? A few weeks ago, an amateur astronomer in British Columbia, who was looking for the mysterious satellite just launched by SpaceX (USA-280, aka Zuma), instead detected a different signal entirely from an object identifying itself as 166. ID 166 was a NASA satellite that had been lost 12 years earlier.
NASA launched the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite in 2000 with a two-year primary mission to map and measure Earth’s magnetosphere. It was the first device able to do so, and the data that it collected was used in over 400 peer-reviewed papers.
IMAGE had redundant electronics systems. The main system (the A side) failed in 2004, but NASA turned on the backup (the B side), and the craft kept plugging along until 2005, when it, too, stopped working. As near as NASA could determine at the time , “the craft’s power supply subsystems failed, rendering it lifeless.”
Through much of the subsequent year, NASA tried to revive it, and when those efforts failed, it kept tabs on IMAGE for another year after that. Funding for the program elapsed in 2007.
A few weeks back, amateur astronomer Scott Tilley detected a signal from IMAGE. With no idea how to contact NASA, he tweeted his discovery. The next day, he had a mailbox filled with messages from people who had worked on the program, he told The Washington Post .
NASA built reboot mechanisms into the IMAGE satellite. Back in 2004, the agency’s engineers were banking on the possibility of a reboot first when the A side failed and then again when the B side finally went dark a year later, but it never happened before the plug was pulled on the program.
Eventually, it did happen, however, although no one is sure when.
As of Monday, Feb. 5, NASA has determined that the craft’s battery is fully charged. Curiously, the element that rebooted was the A side, previously thought dead. And IMAGE is definitely sending telemetry, though NASA has no idea what the data is.
The agency has a problem familiar to the hundreds of thousands of people who had film developed by Seattle Film Works in the ’90s and now have all of their photos from that era stored on floppy disks in the .sfw format. At least for that stuff, there are retro floppy readers and format converters available. NASA no longer has any of the hardware or software used to communicate with IMAGE. It has to completely reconstruct the software from scratch.
“NASA is starting to recreate a small control center that can generate the commanding needed to better understand and control the satellite,” reported the agency . Once they accomplish that, they’ll be able to determine which, if any, of the satellite’s six scientific instruments can be turned back on.
Image credit: NASA
Advertisement
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine
