Here ’s a prissy bit of space news for you . An amateur uranologist has found an one-time NASA artificial satellite believe to be dead , and scientists are now in the process of making tangency with it again .

Scott Tilley had been looking for signaling from the mysteriousZuma mission , launched on a SpaceX rocket last calendar month . But in ablog posthe described how he instead peck up signals from the $ 150 million Imager for Magnetopause - to - Aurora Global Exploration ( IMAGE ) satellite .

“ The betting odds are highly good that it ’s live , ” Patricia Reiff from Rice University in Texas , a carbon monoxide - investigator on the original mission , toldScience .

ikon was launch by NASA back on March 25 , 2000 , to examine how Earth ’s magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind . In December 2005 , however , the space vehicle quit transmit and was take for to be fall back .

Tilley , however , found that it was still channel . “ sporadically the spacecraft will enter an eclipse and NASA surmised that this may trigger it to re-start and implement office back to the communications system , ” he wrote .   “ That appears to have happen ! ”

The ballistic capsule is in a highly oval-shaped field ( HEO ) , one that take on it about 46,000 km ( 29,000 miles ) from Earth , before swoop down to 1,000 kilometre ( 620 miles ) . It completes an orbit about once every 14 hours .

Tilley spoke to Dr James L Burch at the Southwest Research Institute , who was the main investigator on the mission , who said he was “ very mad ” about the discovery . He then alerted some of the team , who said they planned to support the signal .

“ NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , Maryland , has acquired sentence on the Deep Space connection ( DSN ) to focalize on the beginning and determine whether the sign is indeed IMAGE , ” NASA observe in astatement .

“ This process must take into consideration the vintage nature of the space vehicle , and includes locating appropriate software package and commands to potentially operate the foreign mission . We will apportion more information as it becomes uncommitted . ”

As of today it see like NASA is still trying to get hold of the space vehicle . It ’s unclear what they ’ll do if they do make touch , and whether it might be used for any scientific observations again . Nonethless though , it ’s a somewhat neat discovery from an amateur uranologist .

This is n’t the only clock time something like this has hap . Back in May 2014 , scientistsmade contactwith the International Sun - Earth Explorer ( ISEE-3 ) . They were able to boot the spacecraft and even fire its thruster , but striking was lost again in September 2014 . We ’ll have to wait and see what luck befalls IMAGE .

Update : NASA has confirmed the finding !