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.
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.