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. "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." 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. 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. 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 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. 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.
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.