Citizen Scientist Discovers "Lost" Re-Booted Satelite -- NASA Befuddled but Happy!

“But who’s going to listen to some guy in his basement with a coil of copper wire on his roof?”

stock here-- indeed Citizen Scientists retain the ability to think and intuit.    Could this satellite have been rebooted by an Eclipse?

We’ve covered this before, and now here’s the backstory and timeline from NASA Goddard, it’s fun reading.

A Detailed Timeline of The IMAGE Mission Recovery

The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, or IMAGE, spacecraft was re-discovered in January 2018 after more than twelve years of silence. A powerhouse of magnetosphere and aurora research, the IMAGE mission was a key driver of studies of the Sun-Earth connection from its launch on March 25, 2000, until its last contact on Dec. 18, 2005.
Now a watchful citizen scientist, NASA, and a team of IMAGE scientists and engineers detected and received data from the spacecraft. Here’s how it happened.

Saturday, Jan. 20
1:39 AM EST:  Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, using his home satellite detection rig, begins his nightly sky scan then goes to bed.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/02/12/what-one-amateur-observer-did-that-kicked-nasa-into-action-the-backstory-and-timeline/

Here is one:

Some amazing things discovered or invented by amateurs:

1. Gravity, laws of motion – Newton was a 23-yr old farm boy though he studied math at Cambridge U
2. Lightning rod – Benjamin Franklin was a science hobbyist
3. Combustion, conservation of mass – Lavoisier’s hobby was chemistry
4. Planet Uranus – Hershel was a musician and amateur astronomer
5. Group theory – Galois was a 19-yr old college student
6. Conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics) – Joule was a brewer not a professional scientist
7. Maxwell’s equations (in modern form), vector analysis – Heaviside was a self-taught mathematician
8. Fundamentals of rocketry – Tsiolkovsky was a recluse who did scientific research in his home
   Airplane – Wright bros. were bicycle makers tinkering with flying machines
9. Special theory of relativity, photoelectric effect – Einstein was a 26-yr old clerk but he had a degree in physics
10. Continental drift (precursor to plate tectonics) – Wegener was a meteorologist dabbling in geology
11. Electronic TV – conceptualized by 14-yr old Farnsworth, independently of other inventors
12. Computer – Zuse was a civil engineer tinkering with computing machines in 1930s