Proving that every cloud has a silver lining, NASA has just retrieved one of its lost satellites which went missing for in space for over a decade.
The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) was launched in 2000 to produce extensive images of atmospheric plasma. Its initial successful two-year mission was in 2002, but it happened to unexpectedly fail in sending routine messages on Earth on December 18th, 2005. The eclipse of 2007 was expected to help the satellite reboot, but it didn’t. The mission was declared over then, and the satellite was thought to spend the rest of its life sailing in space.
However, earlier in January, a novice astronomer spotted it in the skies. By figuring out the type of hardware and operating systems used in the satellite, in about a week, NASA confirmed that it was the IMAGE indeed as those components no longer exist.
The team of NASA was able to read some basic data, point towards its operational main control system. Later on, the data and readings were collected from the satellite by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. This helped them authenticate its ID. In the upcoming weeks, the team will analyze the data and study more about the condition of the satellite and what did it do up in space all these years.