An amateur astronomer rediscovered a Nasa satellite which has been lost in space for more than a decade.

Scott Tilley was scanning the skies in search of a secret US government spy satellite launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX when he found signals from the long-lost satellite called the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (Image).

Launched on 25 March, 2000, its mission was to study the magnetic field protecting the Earth from cosmic radiation. But in December 2005, Image stopped communicating with Nasa and its mission was declared over in 2007 after scientists failed to regain control.

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It is hoped Mr Tilley’s find could potentially give Nasa the opportunity to revive its mission.

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The 47-year-old amateur astronomer from Canada found signals he thought might belong to the satellite during his search for evidence of the mysterious Zuma, a classified US government satellite launched by SpaceX in January which was later claimed to have been lost during deployment. But instead of locating Zuma, he picked up a signal from Image.

“I did a little Googling and discovered that it had been ‘Lost in Space’ since December 18, 2005 after just dropping off the grid suddenly,” Mr Tilley wrote about the discovery in a post on his blog. He then notified Nasa and the space agency used five separate radio antennas to confirm the signal came from the lost satellite.

“The odds are extremely good that it’s alive,” Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original Image mission, told Science magazine.

Nasa said its team were able to “read some basic housekeeping data, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational”.

Scientists and engineers at its Goddard Space Flight Centre would continue to analyse data from the space craft to learn more about its status after 12 years in space, the agency said.

“The team is collectively holding their breath waiting for some real information exchange between Image and the ground,” Ms Reiff, who now works as a space plasma physicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, added.

According to its final report, Image made 37 unique scientific discoveries during what was initially designed as a two-year mission.

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Nasa now has the task of adapting the satellite’s software to communicate with its more modern systems. The agency said if it could decode the satellite’s signal, it would attempt to turn on its science payload to understand how well it has survived the extreme temperatures and radiation of space.</s>The IMAGE spacecraft undergoing launch preparations in early 2000. Credit: NASA

The identity of the satellite re-discovered on Jan. 20, 2018, has been confirmed as NASA's IMAGE satellite.

After an amateur astronomer recorded observations of a satellite in high Earth orbit on Jan. 20, 2018, his initial research suggested it was the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE)—a NASA mission launched into orbit around Earth on March 25, 2000.

Seeking to ascertain whether the signal indeed came from IMAGE, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, coordinated the use of five separate antennas to acquire radio frequency signals from the object.

As of Monday, Jan. 29, observations from all five sites were consistent with the radio frequency characteristics expected of IMAGE. Specifically, the radio frequency showed a spike at the expected center frequency, as well as side bands where they should be for IMAGE. Oscillation of the signal was also consistent with the last known spin rate for IMAGE.

On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite. The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166—the ID for IMAGE.

The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.

Diagram of NASA's IMAGE spacecraft. Credit: NASA

Scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.

NASA will next attempt to capture and analyze data from the signal. The challenge to decoding the signal is primarily technical. The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Center no longer exist, and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering.

If data decoding is successful, NASA will seek to turn on the science payload—currently turned off—to understand the status of the various science instruments. Pending the outcome of these activities, NASA will decide on how to proceed.

IMAGE was designed to image Earth's magnetosphere and produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region. After successfully completing and extending its initial two-year mission in 2002, the satellite unexpectedly failed to make contact on a routine pass on Dec. 18, 2005. After a 2007 eclipse failed to induce a reboot, the mission was declared over.

Explore further Updates on recovery attempts for NASA IMAGE mission

More information: For the IMAGE mission webpage: For the IMAGE mission webpage: https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/</s>For 12 years, a NASA satellite called IMAGE was lost in space.

NASA scientists hadn’t heard from the satellite since 2005, after it abruptly stopped responding.

But earlier this month, an amateur astronomer happened to be searching for traces of the secretive Zuma mission launched by SpaceX when he stumbled onto something entirely different: signals from a satellite that was not accounted for.

Scott Tilley, who is based in Canada, then matched the signal to a NASA spacecraft and theorized that it was the long-lost satellite IMAGE. He blogged and tweeted about his findings. He also reached out to the principal investigator who had been responsible for the satellite’s mission, according to Tilley’s blog.

NASA set off to investigate and trained its Deep Space Network, a constellation of radio telescopes used to communicate with space missions, to search for the satellite. Five separate antennas then confirmed the signal and matched the satellite’s identity.

On Tuesday, NASA confirmed that the re-discovered satellite is indeed IMAGE.

And the space agency also had some unexpected news.

“The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational,” according to NASA’s statement.

IMAGE launched in March 25, 2000. It was designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere — the magnetic field that shields the Earth. It was hailed as a success, helping map out the Earth’s magnetic field in detail and resulted in 37 unique scientific discoveries, according its final report. It successfully completed its initial scheduled mission — originally slated for two years — and had been in its extended phase when the satellite stopped routine contact on December 18, 2005.

NASA tried to regain control of the satellite, but it ultimately concluded that the spacecraft likely suffered an event that disabled its power supply and wasn’t able to recover. The mission had been declared over in 2007.

After IMAGE was lost, its original software and databases needed to operate the satellite had been decommissioned. NASA said that it will now attempt to adapt the software to its more modern systems.

“Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft,” NASA said.

After the confirmation, Tilley wrote on his blog: “Welcome back IMAGE! Serve us well again…”

He told the CBC: “As somebody who’s loved space since being a kid, I’m happy to have contributed something positive.”</s>NASA has had a pretty great string of luck when it comes to spacecraft reliability as of late. The Cassini probe around Saturn proved to be so reliable that its mission was extended multiple times and the Juno probe hanging out around Jupiter is already being considered for a mission extension thanks to its steady performance. Now, something completely unexpected has given NASA’s hardware profile another boost, as a satellite thought to have been dead for well over a decade has suddenly woken back up.

The IMAGE satellite (which stands for Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) was initially launched way back in early 2000. The spacecraft was designed to observe the plasma levels around Earth. It performed well for its first two years in service and was granted a two-year extension for continued research but then went dark in late 2005. One final try to make contact with the satellite in 2007 failed and NASA declared the satellite dead. That is until an amateur astronomer stumbled upon a signal from the satellite just days ago indicating it was very much alive.

“The identity of the satellite re-discovered on Jan. 20, 2018, has been confirmed as NASA’s IMAGE satellite,” NASA says. “On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite. The signal showed that the spacecraft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE. The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.”

In order to actually make contact with the satellite, NASA had to do a little bit of software time travel. The various programs and databases that were used with the satellite have been upgraded and replaced in the 13 years since it went silent and the agency has been forced to revive some antiquated software so that they could speak the satellite’s language.

NASA says it could take a couple of weeks to actually determine the full status of the satellite and its various tools, but if they can get it back up and running they may be able to gather data from its instruments.</s>NASA has confirmed that the satellite found by an amateur astronomer is indeed the long-lost, presumed-dead IMAGE spacecraft.

Scott Tilley picked up the signal from IMAGE while scouring the skies to see if he could find the super-secret spy satellite Zuma, launched by SpaceX earlier this month. He guessed that it was the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft, a mission launched in 2000 and lost five years later.

But although NASA was able to find the signal for the same satellite and it looked pretty much like IMAGE, it couldn’t confirm for definite – because the technology on the craft was so old, the agency couldn’t talk to it anymore.

Both the hardware and software aboard IMAGE is now basically obsolete and NASA had to reverse-engineer a way to decode its data and send signals that its operating system could receive.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab finally successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite on January 30 and interpreted the signal as coming from spacecraft ID 166 – IMAGE.

“The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational,” the agency said in a statement.

“Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will continue to try to analyse the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.”</s>NASA on Wednesday said that at least the main control system of its IMAGE satellite, which was re-discovered by an amateur astronomer on January 20, is operational. Launched on March 25, 2000, IMAGE, short for Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, was designed to image Earth’s magnetosphere and produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region.

After successfully completing and extending its initial two-year mission in 2002, contact was unexpectedly lost on December 18, 2005. After an amateur astronomer recorded observations of a satellite in high Earth orbit on January 20, 2018, his initial research suggested it was the IMAGE satellite. NASA has now confirmed the identity of the satellite.

“On the afternoon of January 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite. The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 – the ID for IMAGE,” NASA said. The NASA team was been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.

NASA said it will continue to try to analyse the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. “This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems,” the statement added.

For all the latest Technology News, download Indian Express App</s>U.S. space agency NASA said Tuesday a satellite it considered "dead" more than a decade ago was indeed alive.

The identity of the satellite rediscovered on Jan. 20 by an amateur astronomer has been confirmed as NASA's IMAGE satellite, the U.S. space agency said in a statement.

"On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite," it said, adding "the signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 -- the ID for IMAGE."

IMAGE, or Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, was designed to image the Earth's magnetosphere and produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region.

The satellite was launched on Mar. 25, 2000, and the contact was unexpectedly lost on Dec. 18, 2005. After a 2007 effort failed to induce a reboot, the mission was declared over.

Earlier this month, an amateur astronomer called Scott Tilley wrote on his blog that he picked up a signal from a satellite labeled "2000-017A, 26113" which he knew corresponded to the IMAGE satellite.

NASA said its team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.

Next, scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about its condition.

This process will take a week or two as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to modern systems, NASA added.</s>It’s easy to imagine the excitement NASA personnel must have felt when an amateur astronomer contacted NASA to tell them that he might have found their missing IMAGE satellite. After all, the satellite had been missing for 10 years.

IMAGE, which stands for Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, was launched on March 25th, 2000. In Dec. 2005 the satellite failed to make routine contact, and in 2007 it failed to reboot. After that, the mission was declared over.

It’s astonishing that after 10 years, the satellite has been found. It’s even more astonishing that it was an amateur who found it. As if the story couldn’t get any more interesting, the amateur astronomer who found it—Scott Tilly of British Columbia, Canada—was actually looking for a different missing satellite: the secret ZUMA spy satellite launched by the US government on January 7, 2018. (If you’re prone to wearing a tin foil hat, now might be a good time to reach for one.)

After Tilly contacted NASA, they hurried to confirm that it was indeed IMAGE that had been found. To do that, NASA employed 5 separate antennae to seek out any radio signals from the satellite. As of Monday, Jan. 29, signals received from all five sites were consistent with the radio frequency characteristics expected of IMAGE.

In a press release, NASA said, “Specifically, the radio frequency showed a spike at the expected center frequency, as well as side bands where they should be for IMAGE. Oscillation of the signal was also consistent with the last known spin rate for IMAGE.”

Then, on January 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (JHUAPL) reported that they had successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite. In that signal was the ID code 166, the code for IMAGE. There were probably some pretty happy people at NASA.

So, now what?

NASA’s next step is to confirm without a doubt that this is indeed IMAGE. That means capturing and analyzing the data in the signal. That will be a technical challenge, because the types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Center no longer exist. According to NASA, “other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering.” But that should be no problem for NASA. After all, they got Apollo 13 home safely, didn’t they?

If NASA is successful at decoding the data in the signal, the next step is to attempt to turn on IMAGE’s science payload. NASA has yet to decide how to proceed if they’re successful.

IMAGE was the first spacecraft designed to “see the invisible,” as they put it back then. Prior to IMAGE, spacecraft examined Earth’s magnetosphere by detecting particles and fields they encountered as they passed through them. But this method had limited success. The magnetosphere is enormous, and simply sampling a small path—while better than nothing—did not give us an accurate understanding of it.

IMAGE was going to do things differently. It used 3-dimensional imaging techniques to measure simultaneously the densities, energies and masses of charged particles throughout the inner magnetosphere. To do this, IMAGE carried a payload of 7 instruments:

These instruments allowed IMAGE to not only do great science, and to capture great images, but also to create some stunning never-seen-before movies of auroral activity.

This is a fascinating story, and it’ll be interesting to see if NASA can establish meaningful contact with IMAGE. Will it have a treasure trove of unexplored data on-board? Can it be re-booted and brought back into service? We’ll have to wait and see.

This story is also interesting culturally. IMAGE was in service at a time when the internet wasn’t as refined as it is currently. NASA has mastered the internet and public communications now, but back then? Not so much. For example, to build up interest around the mission, NASA gave IMAGE its own theme song, titled “To See The Invisible.” Yes, seriously.

But that’s just a side-note. IMAGE was all about great science, and it accomplished a lot. You can read all about IMAGE’s science achievements here.</s>The satellite beamed back pictures of an enormous solar storm in summer 2000, and allowed scientists to essentially live-stream "weather" in space. The sphere around the Earth proved to be a much stranger place than had been thought. IMAGE discovered that the Earth spits out jets of its own atmosphere to defend itself from space storms — like a squid shooting ink — the Dallas Morning News wrote in 2002. It discovered cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, tracked down the source of mysterious radiation, and imaged 100,000-volt charged particles whipping around the circumference of the globe.

And in the last month of 2005 — on the same day the U.S. president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising an end to a still-young Iraq War — IMAGE stopped sending pictures. The satellite had suddenly gone invisible itself.

The scientists tried to figure out why. A tripped breaker in the radio was their best guess. But without a radio, they couldn't tell it to turn itself back on.

After a month of silence from IMAGE, NASA published a news release that declared the satellite's mission a great success — one that was now over.

"The craft's power supply subsystems failed," the agency wrote, "rendering it lifeless."

NASA was wrong. IMAGE was not dead, but it would circle Earth for more than a decade before a man with no professional astronomy training — one who did not always accept the official explanation of events — heard its call.

The 21st century moved into its second decade, and space exploration changed. New machines were sent into orbit, and some of them, like IMAGE, were lost too.

In the first month of 2018, an unknown government agency used a private company to launch a secret satellite, code-named "Zuma." It was nothing like IMAGE; it was a machine intended to be invisible to most of the world.

No one has said publicly what, exactly, went wrong during the Jan. 7 launch, whether Zuma crashed back into an ocean or simply died in space. Its fate and purpose have become a mystery of the new Space Age — and all of this bothered Scott Tilley very much.

Tilley is a 47-year-old electrical engineer who lives on the west coast of Canada. His hobby is radio astronomy. In a sense, it's also his cause.

"Space is not owned by anybody," Tilley told The Washington Post. "Anybody should be able to look up and know those little dots moving across the night sky are not bombs."

Secret military satellites and classified orbits bother him, so he has banded together with a small group of fellow amateurs across the world to to track down every satellite whose operators don't want it to be seen.

Maybe Zuma was in pieces at the bottom of an ocean, Tilley thought. But maybe not. So he began to scan. He used no telescope, listening instead for radio signals out there, in the invisible ocean.

When Tilley caught a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it. Whatever it was, it was orbiting much higher than Zuma was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn't interest him. "I didn't think of it much more," he wrote on his blog.

But as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again — stronger this time — and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue.

The signal matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead.

Tilley had to Google the old satellite to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission's failure.

"Once I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened," Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News.

Then he rushed to contact NASA himself.

That old news release announcing the death of IMAGE had not actually been the end of its story on Earth. A week later, in early 2006, NASA quietly convened a board of experts to pore over the satellite's entire data set and figure out what went wrong.

They worked for months. When their final report was released, the board still figured IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and essentially bricked itself, like a bad iPhone.

But they had come up with a theory for how the satellite might be fixed. Or rather how it might fix itself.

IMAGE was solar-powered, and designed so that if its battery ever drained enough, it would try to reset its computer and flip the breaker back. The board thought this was most likely to happen in late 2007, when IMAGE's orbit would put it in the Earth's shadow from the sun — from the satellite's point of view, a deep eclipse.

But the theory didn't pan out. When NASA tried to the contact IMAGE after the eclipse, it remained as silent as ever, so the agency closed down the mission for good.

And then, a decade later, Tilley found the machine chirping away.

After his discovery, another independent astronomer, Cees Bassa, looked for IMAGE's signal in years of old data. He hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse didn't manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably some time between 2014 and 2016.

"Most likely the battery efficiency degraded such over the IMAGE lifetime that during the less deep eclipses the battery drained sufficiently to lead to the reset and bring the transmitter aboard IMAGE back to life," Bassa wrote.

NASA hasn't confirmed that. In fact, the agency was initially skeptical that the signal Tilley found actually came from IMAGE.

After Tilley contacted NASA last week, scientists trained antennas at the Goddard Space Flight Center on the object. Initial tests showed its orbit, frequency, oscillation and spin rate all matched their old, lost satellite.

Even so, NASA was cautious in its public updates, writing Sunday that it still wanted to analyze the signal's encoded data before it could be sure.

Meanwhile, astronomers amateur and professional were getting excited. "The team is collectively holding their breath," Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original mission, told Science Magazine.

On his blog, Tilley quoted from an email sent to him by James Burch, the lead investigator on the IMAGE mission, who wrote so many years ago of a machine to map an invisible sea.

Confirmation finally came Tuesday. It came couched in the technical jargon of space science, and was no less momentous for it.

"On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite," NASA wrote. "The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE.

"The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational."

Translation: There is hope that IMAGE will one day send more pictures of the"ocean" where it's been adrift for more than 12 years.

"I really hope the scientists who built this thing and put it in space are able to repurpose this and put it back into action," Tilley told CBC. "And we get the benefit of all the beautiful science, coming home."

He was named nowhere in NASA's news release, except as an anonymous "amateur astronomer."

But that's fine. He found the thing, when the professionals might have left it lost forever.</s>The amateur astronomer, who searches for satellites in secret orbits as a hobby, originally set out on Jan. 20 to scan the skies for Zuma, a classified military satellite that supposedly failed to reach orbit after a Jan. 8 launch from Cape Canaveral. Instead, the signal that hit his ground station came back with the mysterious identity of "IMAGE."

"I did a little Googling and discovered that it had been 'Lost in Space' since December 18, 2005 after just dropping off the grid suddenly," Tilley wrote on his Riddles in Space blog. "NASA considered the spacecraft a total loss due to a design flaw that manifested while the spacecraft was in its extended mission."

After gathering more data on IMAGE's signal, Tilley reached out to NASA. By utilizing its Deep Space Network of spacecraft communication facilities to analyze the signal, NASA confirmed that the once-dead satellite was indeed back on the celestial map.

"On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite," they wrote in a blog post. "The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE."

Perhaps even more impressive is this: 13 years after it was declared lost, the satellite may yet have enough life to conduct some aspects of its original mission.

"The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational," NASA added.

False-color image of ultraviolet Aurora australis captured by NASA's IMAGE satellite and overlaid onto NASA's satellite-based Blue Marble image. (Photo: NASA)

Launched in March 2000, IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration), was the first spacecraft dedicated to imaging and studying Earth's magnetosphere. During the five years before it abruptly vanished, the satellite confirmed several theories regarding the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere; it also captured unprecedented images and discovering phenomena previously unknown to science.

While NASA is excited to have the satellite back, the agency is quick to note that technology back on Earth has advanced significantly since it was lost. To that end, they may need to perform some reverse engineering to read its data stream.

"The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Center no longer exist, and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering," they shared.

As Tilley notes on his blog, the most important lesson gleaned from IMAGE's rediscovery may be the way we treat lost satellites in the future.

"Perhaps this is the beginning of a new way of thinking about archiving mission hardware and software when failures seem to have a probability of being recovered in the distant future," he writes. "Humanity’s future in space will require us to think about compatibility with hardware that we let slip away for long periods of time and somehow finds its way home and also listening for that hardware so we know when wayward missions come back to us."
NASA confirms that Scott Tilley, a Canadian amateur astronomer and satellite tracker, has rediscovered NASA's IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) satellite while he was searching for the U.S. government's classified Zuma satellite. NASA engineers will try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft.