The IMAGE mission, part of NASA's Medium Explorers program, launched on March 25, 2000. For nearly six years it worked flawlessly, but in December 2005 it suddenly stopped responding, and NASA declared it lost. In late January, astronomer and electrical engineer Scott Tilley was setting up his station to track a classified satellite when he picked up a signal that turned out to be IMAGE — alive and talking.
The story begins on January 8, when SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 Full Thrust from Cape Canaveral carrying a single payload: Zuma, also known as USA-280. The designation suggests that both the satellite and its objective are classified. But something unexpected happened: according to the (limited) data available, Zuma never reached its orbit. The Falcon 9's first stage landed without issue and operated within established parameters, yet SpaceX refused to answer any questions about the satellite's fate. The same goes for Northrop Grumman, which built Zuma, and to add to the confusion, NORAD still lists it in its official catalog. There are two possibilities: either Zuma was destroyed, or it is in orbit and they are trying to hide it. That sets an enormous challenge for some astronomy enthusiasts determined to locate Zuma, and Scott Tilley is one of them.
Instead of a spy satellite, Tilley found something far more interesting. After comparing the signal he received with a standard catalog, he determined it was NASA's IMAGE satellite. That satellite had been declared lost after it stopped functioning without warning in December 2005. Experts believed that by the end of 2007, when its batteries ran down sufficiently, IMAGE would perform an automatic reset, but that never happened, confirming the mission's end. Twelve years later, Tilley found IMAGE "talking" as if nothing had happened.
Tilley contacted NASA, and after initial skepticism, verification of the data confirmed it was indeed IMAGE. The next step is to finish analyzing the telemetry and develop a new platform to make the satellite compatible with NASA's current systems. In the best case, this process will take a couple of weeks, but no one doubts it is worth it, given that the agency could recover millions of dollars in assets and obtain more science from that satellite.
