Science

IMAGE

Magnetospheric Imaging Science Satellite · NASA

IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration), a NASA satellite launched in 2000 to photograph Earth's invisible magnetosphere directly for the first time. It vanished without warning in December 2005 — declared lost after a suspected power system failure — and NASA closed the mission. Then in January 2018, amateur astronomer Scott Tilley, searching for a completely different classified satellite, stumbled across IMAGE's signal still faintly transmitting. NASA confirmed the identification and briefly reestablished contact — a genuine 12-years-later resurrection of a satellite everyone had given up for dead.