BURIED NEWSNASA lost a satellite for 13 years. An amateur found it by accident.
In March 2000, NASA launched IMAGE — a satellite built to photograph the invisible: the magnetic shield that protects Earth. For five years it worked perfectly. Then, in December 2005, it went silent. No distress call, no debris, no answer. NASA tried to wake it, gave up, and declared the mission over. The internet filed it under "lost" and moved on.
Thirteen years later, in January 2018, a Canadian amateur radio astronomer named Scott Tilley was scanning the sky for something else entirely — a classified spy satellite that had just failed to reach orbit. Instead, his antenna caught a steady signal on an old frequency. He checked the identifier. It was IMAGE. Still in orbit. Still powered. Still trying to talk to a planet that had stopped listening more than a decade earlier.
NASA confirmed it within days: the dead satellite was alive — batteries charging, main systems responsive. Somewhere along the way it had rebooted itself. And then it simply waited.
Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, January 2018 · Verified before excavation