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Amateur Astronomer Discovers Long-Dead NASA Satellite Has Come Back To Life (behindtheblack.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the back-from-the-dead dept.

schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: In his hunt to locate Zuma, an amateur astronomer has discovered that a long-dead NASA satellite, designed to study the magnetosphere, has come back to life. IMAGE went dead in 2005, and though NASA thought it might come back to life after experiencing a total eclipse in 2007 that would force a reboot, no evidence of life was seen then. It now appears that the satellite came to life sometime between then and 2018, and was chattering away at Earth waiting for a response. NASA is now looking at what it must do to take control of the spacecraft and resume science operations. Zuma is the secret U.S. government payload that was launched by SpaceX earlier this month and reportedly lost. As for why Scott Tilley -- the amateur radio astronomer -- decided to have a look for the present of secret military satellites, Ars Technica reports that he apparently does this semi-regularly as a hobby and, in this case, was inspired by the Zuma satellite.

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting find by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a very interesting find.

    Apparently NASA will try to contact the satellite using the Deep Space Network, and assess it's condition.

    Right now JPL is in the process of digging up the 13-year old "owner's manual" :-)

  2. Amateur Astronomer? by fred911 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Before all the beards came of age we just called them Ham Radio Operators. They're always raising the level. Glad to see the name promotion and the hobby once again verifying how well spent the frequencies protected and allocated to the service are.

    "Scott Tilley VE7TIL / VA7LF discovered a signal from the IMAGE satellite that NASA lost contact with in 2005"

    http://www.southgatearc.org/ne...

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  3. NASA has confirmed that IMAGE is alive by Depili · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.satobs.org/seesat/J... Engineers at GSFC have acquired the suspect S-band source using the 4m CTA (Compatibility Test Antenna) here at GSFC (.jpg attached and no I’m not in the picture). They acquired the signal while the target was on ascent at about 2RE. Center frequency (CF) was between 2272.478 and 2273.418. The difference between IMAGE documented CF of 2272.5Mhz can be attributed to expected Doppler. Subcarriers are visible as well 1.7Mhz from CF as expected. The signal strength was oscillating. Plots will be forthcoming. The oscillation is not unexpected given IMAGE’s loss of spin balance. All indications so far suggest that this is, in fact, IMAGE. Richard J. Burley