Amateur astronomer discovers a revived NASA satellite

After years in darkness, a NASA satellite is phoning home.

Some 12 years since it was thought lost because of a systems failure, NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) has been discovered, still broadcasting, by an amateur astronomer. The find, which he reported in a blog post this week, presents the possibility that NASA could revive the mission, which once provided unparalleled views of Earth’s magnetosphere.

The astronomer, Scott Tilley, spends his free time following the radio signals from spy satellites. On this occasion, he was searching in high-Earth orbit for evidence of Zuma, a classified U.S. satellite that’s believed to have failed after launch. But rather than discovering Zuma, Tilley picked up a signal from a satellite labeled “2000-017A,” which he knew corresponded to NASA’s IMAGE satellite. Launched in 2000 and then left for dead in December 2005, the $150 million mission was back broadcasting. It just needed someone to listen.

After Tilley revealed the discovery, word rocketed around to former members of IMAGE’s science team, says Patricia Reiff, a space plasma physicist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who was a co-investigator on the mission. “The odds are extremely good that it’s alive,” Reiff says. There also appears to be data beyond telemetry in the signal, perhaps indicating some of the satellite’s suite of six instruments are working.