NASA reckons an amateur astronomer really did find its lost IMAGE satellite – but it can’t talk to it because its tech is so old. Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley was scanning the skies hoping to catch where the classified ZUMA mission had ended up when he stumbled across a satellite in high Earth orbit. His research suggested that the spacebot he’d picked up was the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite, a mission launched by NASA on March 25, 2000 and lost in space since December 2005. NASA has since managed to make observations of the satellite from five different sites and all “were consistent with the radio frequency characteristics expected of IMAGE”. NASA“To confirm beyond doubt that the satellite is IMAGE, NASA will next attempt to capture and analyse data from the signal.

Source: Forbes January 30, 2018 14:03 UTC