Days after an amateur astronomer found an object in high-Earth orbit and deduced it was NASA’s long-lost Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration satellite, the space agency confirmed the object drifting in space was IMAGE. And in an announcement Tuesday, NASA said it would try to restart the science payload aboard the satellite.
IMAGE was launched on March 25, 2000, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and was initially designed for a two-year mission. In that time, it was supposed to “image Earth’s magnetosphere and produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region.” But the mission was extended and performed its task well beyond that time frame.
However, the satellite failed to make contact during a routine pass Dec. 18, 2005. NASA tried rebooting it during an eclipse in 2007, but that didn’t work either, and the mission was written off, the satellite left to drift in space, as another piece of space junk orbiting Earth.
Scott Tilley, an amateur astronomer, runs a blog — “Riddles in the Sky” — which is “dedicated to observing, mostly classified, satellites.” He was looking for Zuma, the secretive satellite launched by SpaceX for an unnamed government organization early in January that went missing soon after. Instead, on Jan. 20, Tilley found another satellite whose signal identified it as IMAGE.
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