Just when everyone thought the story of IMAGE was going to have a Hollywood ending she has displayed a knack for dramatic flare.
On 2018-02-25 at 02:19:19.459 UTC IMAGE ended an approximately 48 hour series of off/on sequences of its TT&C beacon and returned to silence. It’s been over two days now and the beacon has not returned to the air.
The signal sequence in the image above shows the last few minutes of IMAGE’s transmissions. Continue reading “Space Strikes Back, IMAGE Returns to Silence…”
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This tends to be a semi-annual activity as it can eat up a lot of observing resources even with much of the data gathering automated the data reviewing is tedious.
Upon reviewing the data from January 20, 2018, I noticed a curve consistent with an satellite in High Earth Orbit (HEO) on 2275.905MHz, darn not ZUMA… This is not uncommon during these searches. So I set to work to identify the source.
A quick identity scan using ‘strf’ (sat tools rf) revealed the signal to come from 2000-017A, 26113, called IMAGE.
Continue reading “NASA’s Long Dead ‘IMAGE’ Satellite is Alive!”
Riddles in the Sky 