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Last week, nosotros reported on the strange case of NASA's Image satellite. The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (Paradigm) was designed to find and study on the magnetosphere of Earth. It launched in 2000 and worked flawlessly for five years before suddenly shutting down in 2005. After reboot attempts failed and the satellite refused to answer in 2007, NASA ended its mission and moved on to other projects. But several weeks ago, amateur astronomers found Prototype awake once again.

NASA has been investigating the situation and has issued several updates since our coverage last week. 2 things accept occurred worthy of notation. First, on Feb. 2, NASA determined it was communicating with the "A" side of the Image satellite. Considering information technology'southward so expensive to build and launch spacecraft, satellites and exploration vehicles like Curiosity are frequently designed with redundant electronics and backup systems. In this case, the Prototype satellite had a indistinguishable gear up of electronics, ane on each side of the spacecraft.

In 2004, the Epitome satellite underwent what NASA characterizes as an "unexpected power distribution reboot." When the satellite re-established communication, NASA discovered that merely the "B" side electronics were functional. (NASA'south description implies that these different sets of electronics may have literally been on different sides of the satellite, though this is unclear.)

The Epitome satellite, back on Earth in 2000.

The residuum of the mission operated using simply the B side electronics until that organisation failed unexpectedly in 2005. But today, it'southward the A side that'southward one time again agile. The organization's write-up suggests that ability should've been provided to both sides of the spacecraft by default. But in that location'southward no explanation as notwithstanding for why power would've switched over to B, only to reboot at some point subsequently 2007 and plow the A side on again.

New data this week suggests that the spacecraft is in surprisingly good shape for spending an unknown number of years powered down. The batteries are fully charged and nothing in NASA's guidance propose any issues at this point. That said, there are still significant questions the space agency hopes to answer, including why the vehicle has rebooted itself several times, why the A and B sides of the spacecraft have behaved erratically, and why it rebooted in the first identify.

NASA has begun the procedure of attempting to recreate a minor command heart that could communicate with Image'southward scientific payloads and brainstorm checking the scientific instruments to see what kind of work they might still be capable of doing. The system, yet, is playing things condom and proceeding slowly.

On the one hand, NASA doesn't have a lot of spare cashflow, satellites accept years to build, and launches are expensive and e'er run the take chances of something going wrong. It makes sense, therefore, to seize every opportunity to squeeze useful work out of any piece of hardware, then long every bit its economically viable to exercise then. But on the other, something clearly went wrong with the Image satellite. The fact that it's now online once more with the aforementioned set of electronics that failed 13 years ago might exist due to software glitches — or information technology could point to short circuits or other problems with the satellite that can't be stock-still without access to its internals. NASA undoubtedly wants to understand what caused the problem before it sinks a lot of time or endeavor into an ongoing scientific mission.

Feature image courtesy of Wikimedia