IMAGE Spacecraft found by Amateur and Radio Astronomer Scott Tilley (VE7TIL)

Hi Everybody;



An amateur astronomer from British Columbia, Scott Tilley, from Roberts Creek
finds lost IMAGE space craft... it was not heard from in over 12 years!

On the 26 of January NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has confirmed that the radio signature is the one for IMAGE.

Right now NASA and some top Universities in are scrambling to communicate with the craft and download data that can confirm the health and status of the space craft.



Interesting find in the IMAGE archives

I have done some digging into the archives of the IMAGE Spacecraft and I found a recording of the FUV Imager that recorded the event.



http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/sprite...ghlights/dec_04_2002/wic_eclipse_dec_2002.gif

You can clearly see the effect of the shadow of the moon on the ionosphere when the solar conditions do not over power the event. Also the orbit of IMAGE is outside the ionosphere looking down of the event.

Now, if the IMAGE spacecraft is still alive and working, did it also record during the solar eclipse in 2017?

Could it be possible that by sheer luck IMAGE recorded the event and it is still on the HD of the craft!




All the best and 73;


Alex – VE7DXW
MDSR & RF-Seismograph
http://users.skynet.be/myspace/mdsr/

 

Scott did a great job!

 

NASA IMAGE Confirmed
The identity of the satellite re-discovered on Jan. 20, 2018, has been confirmed as NASA’s IMAGE satellite.

On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite. The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE.

The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.

Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will continue to try to analyze the data from the spacecraft to learn more about the state of the spacecraft. This process will take a week or two to complete as it requires attempting to adapt old software and databases of information to more modern systems.

 

Big knuckle-bump for VA7TIL!

Way to go Scott, true radio amateur spirit. Another rebirth ala OSCAR 7.

Gotta snicker a bit at the pro's now scrambling to reverse-engineer and relearn the old telemetry and on-board systems and hopefully put the "Boat Anchor" bird back to work. Wonder if any Ham's are involved with that too.

73, John, WØPV

 

HamSci would be in the position to take it over. We could get propagation reports from directly from it!!!

73;
Alex

 

So, what happened? Did it shift to a random frequency?

 

Here is the link to last report commenting on the loss of the IMAGE space craft.
https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/publication/document/IMAGE_FRB_Final_Report.pdf

This can explains why it was abandoned...

All the best and 73;

Alex - VE7DXW

 

HamSCI looks like just the right outfit to take over - http://www.hamsci.org/

Irony would be that after NASA pulled the plug and discarded the hardware and software a pile of it probably showed up at Hamfest flea-markets and is now sitting in junk-boxes or been re-purposed for who-knows-what. Some LEO sat or EME buff might inadvertently have a CDROM with the now desperately needed "IMAGE-soft" on it .

 

Is there a link to the story of how Scott went about discovering the long lost satellite?

Greg - N9PBD

 

https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/

 

I looked at the report and found this info.

right set of circumstances that would allow the
SSPC to be commanded back ON. The FRB identified a scenario under
which this may occur.

When the spacecraft passes through an eclipse of
sufficient duration a deep main bus voltage sag
may result in a complete bus reset upon leaving
the eclipse

Maybe that's why it came alive.

 

There is also a blog on the NASA web site that shows the progress being made to recover IMAGE;

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-image-confirmed

All the best and 73;

Alex - VE7DXW

 

With so much effort going into hardening the CPU and other complex instruments its disheartening that a glitch in the relatively lowly regarded power supply cripples such a big investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAGE#Loss

"A careful failure analysis revealed that, among plausible causes for an abrupt bidirectional loss of communication, the Solid State Power Converter (SSPC)... The same problem with the same model of power supply had affected the EO-1 and WMAP satellites (launched after IMAGE), but they were able to recover."

OSCAR AO-7 developed a short circuit in a battery which took it down until years later that short apparently went open-circuit, allowing the solar panel to power it back up in sunlight. It has quite an impressive claimed history and still works today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7

The story of the recovery of Intelsat's Galaxy-15 mirrors the one unfolding about IMAGE too.

https://www.space.com/9677-galaxy15-zombie-satellite-life.html

" ... the battery on Galaxy 15 — which relied on solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power — became completely drained, Intelsat officials said. Once that happened, the satellite reset itself as designed and began accepting commands from Intelsat's control center."

 

It's actually VE7TIL, not VA7TIL. There's an article out there with the wrong callsign.

 

DOH! My bad. Sorry for the typo. I knew he was the VE too; it's right there in the thread title!. Hope it wasn't the cause of that error spreading. At least I got the call sign right when editing the sat wiki page.