NASA's IMAGE satellite may have come back to life

[Starman4308]

According to a few articles, an amateur astronomer named Scott Tilley, while searching for ZUMA, spotted some errant radio signals coming from the location of the IMAGE satellite, which failed about ten years ago.

https://gizmodo.com/over-a-decade-later-nasas-long-dead-image-satellite-ma-1822479068

The best speculation I've seen suggests that IMAGE was briefly eclipsed by the Earth, draining its batteries, and once outside of Earth's shadow, went through a full system reboot, and cleared whatever error state had shut it down in 2005.

Also reported was that the telemetry suggests at least one of its six instruments is functional, and NASA is apparently digging through its archives trying to figure out if they can restore communication with IMAGE.

While the scientific return would probably not be huge, since IMAGE's primary mission had been a complete success, it could definitely be a neat story. And if they do bring it back online? Hey, free science satellite!

[Scotius]

Wow. 10+ years of floating in space seemingly dead, and yet this thing is still kicking? Now that's one tough cookie

[ProtoJeb21]

It’s incredible how amateur and citizen scientists are making such amazing contributions to NASA missions during the last few months. First the 5 exo-comets in the Kepler field, then the 5 6 8??? planets of K2-138, and now the detection of a long-dead satellite that’s still active. I wonder what NASA’s new agenda will be for IMAGE if they manage to regain contact with it. 

[insert_name]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1539804522733432&id=118107518236480

[insert_name]

NASA has released a detailed timeline of the recovery effort, IMAGE has been found to be operating on a system that suffered a power failure in 2004 and was presumed to be out of commission

http://nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/a-detailed-timeline-of-the-image-mission-recovery

[insert_name]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed

NASA is currently trying to command image to switch to it's omnidirectional antenna

[insert_name]

Spacecraft has not switched to omnidirectional antenna, does not acknowledge most commands, still transmitting though

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed

[Scotius]

So, the bird is deaf, but not mute? Hopefully something is still salvageable. And even in worst case scenario, it's still should bring valuable data about space communications.

[insert_name]

2 hours ago, Scotius said:

So, the bird is deaf, but not mute? Hopefully something is still salvageable. And even in worst case scenario, it's still should bring valuable data about space communications.

partially deaf, acknowledges some commands but not very reliably