Nasa is set to make an attempt to recover its lost Imager for the Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite mission, which was launched into space in March 2000.
The recovery will be based on observations made by an amateur astronomer regarding the whereabouts of IMAGE, which lost contact with Nasa in December 2005.
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The astronomer reportedly made contact with a satellite that is believed to be IMAGE.
In order to prove the astronomer’s claim, Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, US, has coordinated the use of five separate antennas to obtain radio frequency signals from the lost probe.
The space agency has observed that all the five sites are found to be consistent with the radio frequency characteristics expected of IMAGE.
The radio frequency has specifically shown a spike in the expected centre frequency, and side bands where they should be for IMAGE.
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By GlobalDataNasa said in a statement: “To confirm beyond doubt that the satellite is IMAGE, Nasa will next attempt to capture and analyse data from the signal.
“The challenge to decoding the signal is primarily technical. The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Centre no longer exist and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time, requiring significant reverse-engineering.”
Upon the successful decoding of data, Nasa plans to turn on IMAGE’s science payload, which is currently turned off, to understand the status of the various science instruments.
Based on the results of these activities, Nasa will decide on its future course of action to retrieve the satellite, which was designed to image Earth’s magnetosphere and produce comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in this region.
