NASA Makes Contact With Satellite Thought Lost 13 Years Ago

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rgMekanic

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NASA has announced that they have made contact that had not heard from in 13 years. in 2000 NASA launched the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration or IMAGE. IMAGE was to orbit earth and take photos of the magnetosphere, however in 2005 it failed to make contact, and after a 2007 eclipse it failed to reboot, the mission was declared over. On January 20th an amateur astronomer recorded observations of a signal which was confirmed to be from IMAGE.

I'm excited to see if they can get the scientific data from it, who knows what it's been doing up there silent for all these years. Maybe a windows update caused it not to boot.

The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational. Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.
 
th
 
The result of the first incarnation of Windows 10.
:p
 
you know the hard part of them trying to sync back up?

since the project was scrapped, the software to communicate /get the data no longer exists....

fascinating that a spy satellite hunter found it though.
 
We should just point radio telescopes to listen for said communication.........












Oh, we do ha e these :rolleyes:;):rolleyes:
 
rgMekanic said:
This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.
Click to expand...

Dependency Injection FTW!
 
lenardo2 said:
you know the hard part of them trying to sync back up?

since the project was scrapped, the software to communicate /get the data no longer exists....

fascinating that a spy satellite hunter found it though.
Click to expand...

As someone who worked in Building 21 GSFC Pure Sciences Division-Satellites, I can tell you it was NOT scrapped. Cold storage yes. Scrapped never. You would be surprised how far back NASA kept things.
 
I'm amazed that anyone thought it was worth their time to look for a long-dead satellite and then listen for the dead to speak.

And people think gamers are dorks....
 
Even if they can get it fully functional again, the ground support team has moved to other projects. NASA would have to find money to budget it again.
 
This is awesome!hopefully that guy gets brought on by NASA
 
Wait a minute... So we can track incoming asteroids and comets down to a yard across but we can't find a satellite that's in orbit? I guess the budget was cut to keep tracking poor little IMAGE.
 
NASA knew where the satellite was and it's orbit, it just stopped communicating after being up in space for so long. Considering that it had already completed it's mission and then some, there was no reason to do much other than wait to see if it'd ever come back online.

The truly interesting part about the whole story is that a amateur radio guy that made a hobby out of tracking spy satellites across the sky is who found NASA's satellite in the first place.
 
rgMekanic said:
The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational. Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.
Click to expand...
C'mon software from 2000 is not exactly ancient, most common database structures are virtually unchanged since then. Why do they have to reverse engineer anything? Did they throw out the original software and code? They're making this sound like they're trying to make sense of davinci's plans for a database.
 
How interesting that this satellite, that records earth's Magnetosphere, should come back to life when there are renewed talks about a looming Geomagnetic reversal.
 
Nenu said:
The result of the first incarnation of Windows 10.
:p
Click to expand...

I think it was running Windows ME. But they should be able to update it to Windows 10 now, update process is always smooth.
 
aokman said:
I think it was running Windows ME. But they should be able to update it to Windows 10 now, update process is always smooth.
Click to expand...
I'm sure it's an in place upgrade. Their files will be right where they left them even.
 
M76 said:
C'mon software from 2000 is not exactly ancient, most common database structures are virtually unchanged since then. Why do they have to reverse engineer anything? Did they throw out the original software and code? They're making this sound like they're trying to make sense of davinci's plans for a database.
Click to expand...
The software itself is most likely from the early 90s, as the project was begun in 96 and you don't build a satellite with brand spanking new software that you don't know what kind of bugs it has. Unfortunately the mission requirements don't specify what the data format is or how its stored, but its almost certainly something you've never heard of.
 
M76 said:
C'mon software from 2000 is not exactly ancient, most common database structures are virtually unchanged since then. Why do they have to reverse engineer anything? Did they throw out the original software and code? They're making this sound like they're trying to make sense of davinci's plans for a database.
Click to expand...

Well the problem is, the OS that drives it is. They might be running windows 3.1. (I'm being serious) Try to find graphics drivers, or RS422 comm driver, and a working card for windows 3.1 today? Plus some databases are out of production. Anybody have a copy of Borland Database Engine? I'm not saying this is what they are using. But it should give you an idea of what it will take to get it back up and running.

NASA does an outstanding job of archiving all their software code. Sometimes it sits on tapes, or on folded fan printouts and gets lost. But they do try to keep it. Back in the early 90's they had the largest repository of weather data in the world dating back to the 1960's and it was stored on tape machine towers. Then they bragged about their Terabytes of storage in the size of a warehouse.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
As someone who worked in Building 21 GSFC Pure Sciences Division-Satellites, I can tell you it was NOT scrapped. Cold storage yes. Scrapped never. You would be surprised how far back NASA kept things.
Click to expand...

Isn't building 21 the library?
 
while i am not software engineer in my basement i have in my pile of software boxes:

windows 3.1 on 3.5" floppies (6 if i remember correctly)
windows 95 on disk
windows 98 on disk x2
windows xp on disk x2
windows 7 on disk x3

i do have a disk of borland of some sort or other
i have several old versions of Linux
and lots of older games.
 
lenardo2 said:
while i am not software engineer in my basement i have in my pile of software boxes:

windows 3.1 on 3.5" floppies (6 if i remember correctly)
windows 95 on disk
windows 98 on disk x2
windows xp on disk x2
windows 7 on disk x3

i do have a disk of borland of some sort or other
i have several old versions of Linux
and lots of older games.
Click to expand...

Do you have working hardware and drivers from 1998, 1998, 2001?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

NASA no doubt has the software for the satellite. NASA no doubt has compatible hardware. It's just a matter of scrounging up enough of it to get it to work. (Which sounds like the approach they are going for to get a quick kill) But a recompile and modernization might be in order (provided they aren't using something like OWL for the UI)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
lenardo2 said:
while i am not software engineer in my basement i have in my pile of software boxes:

windows 3.1 on 3.5" floppies (6 if i remember correctly)
windows 95 on disk
windows 98 on disk x2
windows xp on disk x2
windows 7 on disk x3

i do have a disk of borland of some sort or other
i have several old versions of Linux
and lots of older games.
Click to expand...

Punctuation please.

So you are:
"Not a software engineer in your basement" ? Where are you a software engineer then? Are you even a software engineer?
Where is this pile of boxes you speak of?
 
DigitalGriffin said:
Do you have working hardware and drivers from 1998, 1998, 2001?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

NASA no doubt has the software for the satellite. NASA no doubt has compatible hardware. It's just a matter of scrounging up enough of it to get it to work. (Which sounds like the approach they are going for to get a quick kill) But a recompile and modernization might be in order (provided they aren't using something like OWL for the UI)
Click to expand...

I have working hardware and drivers from even before that. Some of it goes back to XT days.

Drivers are not that hard to find for most things.
 
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Tekara said:
NASA knew where the satellite was and it's orbit, it just stopped communicating after being up in space for so long. Considering that it had already completed it's mission and then some, there was no reason to do much other than wait to see if it'd ever come back online.

The truly interesting part about the whole story is that a amateur radio guy that made a hobby out of tracking spy satellites across the sky is who found NASA's satellite in the first place.
Click to expand...

So, is there this guys account of what happened somewhere? I feel like he's got a webpage or a blog somewhere with neat technical stuff.
 
So in other words, the aliens were done with it and dropped it back off?
 
tangoseal said:
Lets hear it flatearthers ... come on... whats your theory now?
Click to expand...
What goes up must come down (I'm just guessing, if they weren't so flat headed they might say it was on a parabolic trajectory). The idea being it got so far away nobody could contact it because, you know, inverse square law (assuming they believe in that).
 
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