Slashdot Mirror
Amateur Astronomer Discovers Long-Dead NASA Satellite Has Come Back To Life (behindtheblack.com)
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.
The one they found isn't "stealth" if that's what's confusing you... the one they "lost" was. Detecting satellites that aren't pinging is ~impossible for now.
"It would likely cost very little more to add the functions of an old satellite to your new stealth satellite's capabilities and duplicate its signals" - oh, ok, you're crazy, I see. That's false in every respect, none the least of which is orbit.
He could very well be both. Many are. Generally amateur astronomers look at the night sky, focused on things beyond the Earth's atmosphere. We generally look in visible light. I did however, build a 12' satellite dish to make a radio map of the milky way (Hydrogen). I would call that amateur radio astronomy.
Some amateurs track satellites and compute their orbits in an attempt to identify them. To listen to their transmissions would require the skills of a HAM.
So, most HAM operators do not posses the skills to track and identify satellites. Most amateur astronomers wouldn't know what to do with a radio transmission from a satellite.
I think the two nicely overlap here.
We now know its communications specs http://pluto.space.swri.edu/IM... and as it was made in the year 2000... NASA has most likely already made the communications protocols, if not the software itself, available to the public. NASA also doesn't have a timetable on reaquiring it, its orbit telemetry was linked in a comment, and this community probably has a few people who can slap an arduino based orbital tracking antenna together... but no one here would want a global observatory satillite or offworld server, right?