A Long-Lost NASA Spacecraft Rises From the Dead
Rick Burley couldn’t believe what he was reading.
The email on his computer screen, forwarded by his former colleague Jim Burch, was from someone named Scott Tilley. Tilley, an amateur astronomer in British Columbia, recently had been searching the skies for a signal from the Zuma satellite, a top-secret government mission that many believe failed after Zuma was launched into orbit last month. His radio equipment detected a new signal, but it wasn’t from Zuma. The signal, Tilley believed, came from a long-lost NASA spacecraft that mysteriously went silent without warning 13 years ago—and was never heard from again.
Burley had worked on that mission. It was called : Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration. launched the spacecraft in, as its name indicates, was about imaging the Earth’s magnetosphere and near-Earth environment in combinations of different ways that we’d never done before,” said the former scientist Jim Spann, now the chief scientist at the science and technology office of ’s Marshall Spaceflight Center.
