That’s really really true, the expression “everything happens exactly when you do not expect”. Space Agency NASA regained contact with the satellite lost in space more than a decade ago. The spacecraft Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, or just IMAGE, was launched in 2000 and was designed to obtain the first comprehensive images of the atmospheric plasma. He completed his first objective in 2002, but has not been in contact with the Earth in the framework of standard checks in 2005.
Scientists had hoped that the Eclipse occurred in 2007, will restart the systems of the spacecraft, but when this did not happen, NASA experts have calculated that the satellite finally lost and now prowls somewhere in the vastness of space. However, this month one Amateur astronomer spotted him floating in the night sky.
Space Agency NASA took a few weeks to confirm that the observed object is indeed a satellite IMAGE. This has proved difficult, as the type of hardware and operating system that are used in this spacecraft are no longer used by the Agency. Since then, the equipment and systems has been updated several times, so NASA had to Tinker over how to restore the device connection.
In the end, the applied physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins successfully managed to collect telemetry data from the IMAGE. Now it will take another few weeks to analyze the data, which will tell not only about the state of the spacecraft, but perhaps new information that the satellite managed to gather in all that time.
NASA regained contact with the satellite lost 13 years ago
Nikolai Khizhnyak