- Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission.
God bless ham radio.
We don't have a real-time auroral observatory satellite right now. Frankensat IMAGE could cure that. Shoot, I might be able to sneak some of the data into one of my forthcoming papers.
Oh man, that is so cool! In the comments, the original project manager and one of their team both kick in on the discussion! They are working the NASA side of things to see if they can get resources reassigned to the project again! Love amateur astronomers and their sleuthing stories.
So far so good NASA HQ said in a telecon today that the biggest hurdle is unearthing all of the command and control code stored inside of a database somewhere. That's quite a small hurdle, unless multiple people totally botched their job. This looks like it could be a successful resurrection! I'm not sure if it's necessary yet, but the biggest challenge might be spinning the spacecraft back up to a quicker RPM. Hopefully the thrusters still work, because orbital adjustments are likely to be needed, regardless, for maximum scientific impact. But yeah, everyone in the community is ecstatic :).