Long-Lost NASA Satellite May Have Been Found by Amateur Astronomer

An amateur astronomer appears to have made contact with a long-lost NASA satellite, the agency reported last Friday (Jan. 26).

The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite was launched in March 2000, and exceeded its initial two-year mission by operating through 2005. However, NASA controllers lost contact with the satellite in December 2005, bringing the mission to an abrupt end.

Now, engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will follow up on the signal detected by the amateur astronomer (who was not named in the statement). The engineers have reserved time on the agency's Deep Space Network — which consists of a series of ground-based radio telescopes — in order to "focus on the source and determine whether the signal is indeed IMAGE," according to the statement.

A NASA diagram of the IMAGE satellite. IMAGE (short for Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) launched in 2000 and went silent unexpectedly in 2005.
Credit: NASA

IMAGE was the "first satellite mission dedicated to imaging the Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by the Earth's magnetic field," according to NASA. The Earth's magnetic-field lines connect to the planet at two poles that lie very close to the geographic North and South poles. The magnetic-field lines rise up from those contact points and curve around the planet, creating a sort of magnetic bubble. The field lines influence the movement of plasma, a gas consisting of charged particles (electrons) and charged atoms (called ions), which can then be measured by in-situ instruments. Previous studies of the magnetosphere relied on stitching together a global picture of this region based on in-situ measurements taken at various locations, according to NASA.

"Instead of such in situ measurements, IMAGE employed a variety of imaging techniques to 'see the invisible' and to produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in the inner magnetosphere," according to NASA's website. "With these images, space scientists were able to observe, in a way never before possible, the large-scale dynamics of the magnetosphere and the interactions among its constituent plasma populations."

Officials said they will share more information about attempts to contact IMAGE as it becomes available.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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