Latest Data from IMAGE Indicates Spacecraft’s Power Functional

For those out of the loop, this is related to a previous post on hackernews of an amateur astronomers blog. He accidentally found signals from an unknown object that looked like NASA's IMAGE satellite, which had previously been lost in 2005.

This blog post ended up reaching a few people who were on the team that worked on the satellite, and lead to NASA investigating whether or not it is still up and running. And according to this post, it seems that NASA has been able to get telemetry data to confirm its the IMAGE satellite.

From what I remember, solar flares can cause reboots for the satellite, and some time in the past 10+ years it started working again. Its a pretty cool example of what amateur astronomy can do and pretty amazing that this long lost scientific instrument can be brought online again.