An Amateur Just Found The Signal of a Satellite NASA Lost 12 Years Ago
NASA confirmed an incredible discovery Tuesday - that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled instead upon signals from a spacecraft that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA can resurrect a mission that changed our understanding of the "invisible ocean" around the Earth.
IMAGE was a machine designed to "see the invisible," as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it.
It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a long technical name - Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration - that obscured its plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of electric gas around the Earth that protects us from the sun, and which we had never seen in full before. Before IMAGE launched in 2000, humans had known only for a few decades that a magnetosphere surrounded the planet.
