New Delhi:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Wednesday that the satellite found by an amateur astronomer is indeed its long-lost IMAGE spacecraft believed to be dead.
Amateaur astromoer, Scott Tilley, in an attempt to find the location of SpaceX’s super-secret spy satellite Zuma, discovered the long-lost NASA satellite while scouring the skies.
Tilley believed the satellite to be Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft, a mission launched in 2000. The satellite had gone lost five years after its launch.
NASA was also able to find the signal for the same satellite, which looked pretty much like IMAGE but could not confirm it due to the technology on the craft was old.
IMAGE was designed to image Earth’s magnetosphere and produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region.
The satellite after successfully completing and extending its initial two-year mission in 2002, the satellite unexpectedly failed to make contact on a routine pass on Dec. 18, 2005. After a 2007 eclipse failed to induce a reboot, the mission was declared over.
The NASA in its statement said, “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.”
The space agency added, “As of Monday, Jan. 29, observations from all five sites were consistent with the radio frequency characteristics expected of IMAGE. Specifically, the radio frequency showed a spike at the expected center frequency, as well as side bands where they should be for IMAGE. Oscillation of the signal was also consistent with the last known spin rate for IMAGE.”
NASA further added that it will next attempt to capture and analyze data from the signal. “The challenge to decoding the signal is primarily technical. The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Center no longer exist, and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering,” said NASA.
