While Searching For Zuma Someone Found IMAGE
Search For Zuma Unearths Lost NASA Satellite, Aviation Week (Paywall)
“An amateur astronomer on the hunt for the classified Zuma satellite has discovered a long-lost NASA science satellite. “Over the past week. the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious Zuma mission,” amateur visual and radio astronomer Scott Tilley wrote on his blog skyriddles.wordpress.com.” … Tilley set to work to identify the signal and soon revealed the source: a NASA science satellite known as IMAGE, which disappeared from radar tracking on Dec. 18, 2005.
January 26, 2018 – NASA Confirms IMAGE is indeed alive!, Scott Tilley
“Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This tends to be a semi-annual activity as it can eat up a lot of observing resources even with much of the data gathering automated the data reviewing is tedious. Upon reviewing the data from January 20, 2018, I noticed a curve consistent with an satellite in High Earth Orbit (HEO) on 2275.905MHz, darn not ZUMA… This is not uncommon during these searches. So I set to work to identify the source. A quick identity scan using ‘strf’ (sat tools rf) revealed the signal to come from 2000-017A, 26113, called IMAGE.”
I saw your title “Zuma Is Still Zooming Through Space”, and got all excited. According to https://skyriddles.wordpres… it turns out it’s not Zuma, but a satellite called IMAGE that was thought long-dead. It looks like the transmitter reset itself, and it’s trying to communicate again, but it’s not ZUMA, at least they don’t want you to think that.
I totally read things backward. Now corrected. I agree, very very cool. Reminds me of the ISEE-3 Reboot project I co-led.
That’s really cool. Hopefully NASA can get IMAGE back under control and start acquiring more scientific data from it.
The might have to crowdsource funding, or make it a student project. I guess that would be the universities of Texas (San Antonio), Maryland, Arizona, California (Berkeley), Johns Hopkins and possibly Liege, if they went with the original science teams affiliations. On the other hand, some of the original team may be retired. I know the lead co-I for the HENA instrument has been threatening to do so for years. Fortunately, it’s the sort of spacecraft that’s easy to operate.
I’ve been an amateur radio operator for many decades (N4XSE), mostly in the HF digital modes. I can say that there are guys with truly professional gear out there (or darn near, anyway). The possibility of a satellite not being found eventually are about nil.
Really awesome. As an undergrad I was involved in a successor mission to IMAGE (TWINS). Hopefully it can be brought back into service.
As several here like to point out, there is a huge cost in mission support. even if the bird is recovered, where do the millions come from to operate it?
Fortunately, IMAGE is one of the easier spacecraft to operate. So we’re talking millions, not the tens of millions you’d probably need for something like the Curiosity rover. But putting the ground system back together wouldn’t be cheap.
Does NASA remember how to talk to it?
They should be. It’s only been a bit over 12 years. The actual hardware and software may not be around, but the documentation would be. I suspect some of the source code is also still around, but it might take work to get it to compile on a modern computer.
This would be quite a bit easier than the ISEE-3 Reboot. There are fewer generations of non-back-compatibility to worry about, and since the days of ISEE-3, things have been more standardized. The data stream for a scientific spacecraft is still largely unique, but there are some standards. I mean things like packetized data, CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) standard headers on data packets, etc. I know someone who looked into one of the ISEE-3 instruments, back when they were trying to get it back up and running (the original PI is a local.) That looked like a bit-by-bit, not byte-by-byte or packet-by-packet, puzzle.