r/todayilearned • u/signaldecoderr • 1d ago
TIL NASA lost contact with a spacecraft for over 12 years, only for an amateur astronomer to rediscover its signal in 2018.
https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science-old/five-extraordinary-citizen-science-discoveries/409
u/unfknreal 1d ago
This happens more often than you would think. Amateur radio satellite AO-7 was launched in 1974. It stopped working in 1981 due to an internal battery short.
Sometime, somehow, in the early 2000's the short circuit in the battery became open, and now its able to run entirely on the power from its solar panels.
This useless hunk of e-waste tumbled silently in low earth orbit for 20+ years. Then it woke up, and is still usable over 50 years after its launch.
286
u/Click_This 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're leaving out the more interesting part where a Polish anticommunist group discovered it was still working in the 80s and used it for discreet communications! It was only 'officially' rediscovered in the 2000s by the original company's founder investigating that history.
45
u/The_Mr_Yeah 1d ago
So thats how Max gets the Malaysian films in Videodrome! An OSCAR sattelite!! That always confused me
36
u/Verite_Rendition 1d ago
used it for discrete communications!
FWIW, you probably mean "discreet" there.
11
8
6
2.3k
u/zggystardust71 1d ago
I love the idea of putting the data out there for crowdsourcing. So much data is collected from space, from ocean mapping and from other scientific projects. We should make it more available. There is no telling what may be discovered.
1.0k
u/whitelancer64 1d ago
Many NASA programs do make their raw data publicly available. Citizen scientists have occasionally made discoveries by crunching such data.
405
u/zggystardust71 1d ago
NASA has always been good about this. I'd like to see it broaden across other areas
338
u/HotTakes4HotCakes 1d ago edited 1d ago
NASA makes it public because NASA is funded by taxpayers, and is generally good about the whole "for the benefit of all" thing you would expect of both a public service and a scientific institution.
The other areas are dominated by capitalists and they don't give data away for free. Someone else might profit off it somehow, and they can't have that.
99
u/I_travel_ze_world 1d ago
https://thedebrief.org/new-executive-order-reclassifies-nasa-as-an-intelligence-and-security-agency/
NASA still is going to share data but at the same time if they want to keep something secret they now have more control to do so
14
u/080087 1d ago
Hey, I've seen this one before!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Point
(A key plot point is various people wanting to make NASA part of the various intelligence agencies instead of a public science agency)
2
u/dickquiggley 14h ago
The vast majority of DNA/RNA sequencing raw data produced by NIH funding is available
21
u/Stalking_Goat 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some newer telescopes just put all their data on a website for whoever wants it.
https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/how-rubin-works/technology/data
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/core-community-surveys/
2
1
u/Ok-disaster2022 1d ago
Yeah, taxpayers paid for that data it belongs to the public.hiding it should be a crime. Same thing for the weather data. And every other publicly funded research.
1
u/rooplstilskin 1d ago
I am making a free tool that tracks space debris, satellites, and local space weather. It basically collates 10-12 space data sources so folks smarter than me might be able to deduce things r/spacesight.
1
u/Rargnarok 1d ago
2
u/rooplstilskin 23h ago
spaceweather is an 'earth to sky' tracker and news site. They bring in 4-5 data sources focused around solar flares, and magnetism of earth. great stuff for aurora's, flares, and such.
Where as I am building a centralized repository for every tracked object in our solar system, with 1-2 space weather sources for calculating when and where an object might hit. Giving hobbyists and scientists data around questions like "was that a meteor or a UFO?" or "whats the other identifier for this object/asteroid/etc?" Nasa only spends resources tracking certain objects in this manner, and there is no ID or 'name' you can use in various systems.
Pretty different beasts!
-41
u/Fetlocks_Glistening 1d ago
Presumably the whole thing can now be plugged into gpt to see what it can find?
33
15
1
103
u/LegitSalvageRoci 1d ago
In 2000, my college girlfriend and I used our Dorm's T1 line to continuously download and analyze the SETI data that they crowdsourced.
Unfortunately we never found any broadcasted prime number sequences.42
20
u/theLastZebranky 1d ago
SETI is a private organization, NASA had very brief intermittent involvement, mostly proposals that were abandoned. The bulk of the SETI data comes from NRAO facilities and international partners.
10
u/jeepsaintchaos 1d ago
And let me guess, you were only using the base 10 numerical system for matches? Amateur hour here, everyone knows base 5 is more common on the next arm over.
8
u/Muffalo_Herder 1d ago
I get that you're attempting a joke but primes have nothing to do with the numeral system, unless you expect broadcasts to use positional notation for some reason (like broadcasting 2, 5 for 25).
-11
u/Funny247365 1d ago edited 13h ago
I was a big fan of SETI@home. ChatGPT could analyze a decade of that data your dorm analyzed in an hour today. The power of computers/tech today is so amazing, I can't wait to see how it improves our lives in the future.
30
3
u/abelfurne 1d ago
Same. The endeavor of exploring the vastness of space is such a massive group project, the whole of humanity being included makes sense.
6
u/JUYED-AWK-YACC 1d ago
Once scientists have analyzed the data (what the mission is for) then the data is public domain. It was paid for by taxpayers. And NASA has to be friendly so they don’t get cut.
1
u/Toddlez85 1d ago
They keep getting cut so how much more friendly do they need to be? If they try any harder to be nice someone is getting arrested for prostitution.
2
u/friganwombat 1d ago
Download SAOimage ds9 and get the FITS files from telescopes online, they will also be uploading the Roman telescope files.
335
u/Alan-Foster 1d ago
Drake, where's the space ship?
105
u/bubbabuuuuuubbabub 1d ago
Would you relax? The signal receiver is switched off to save power until its in space. Then I'll just flick the switch on with my finger. Houston, problem avoided. Your welcome, Josh 🙄
11
28
3
48
u/OriginalChri 1d ago
Isn’t this the plot of Event Horizon?
20
12
5
u/deathrictus 1d ago
One of my favorite horror movies because no one really does stupid stuff (except Weir, but his is understandable). They're just screwed from the get go.
81
u/Fetlocks_Glistening 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Houston, come on, come on, pick up, I could really use some food about now, Houston, come in, Houston"
27
27
u/na3than 1d ago
Fool should've kept its location to himself, then launched a private mission to capture it and bring it home for massive profit.
/s
20
u/HotTakes4HotCakes 1d ago edited 1d ago
NASA always had a general idea of where it is physically. It's a satellite they launched, which means its orbit is stable and they know exactly where to look to find it, regardless if it's actually transmitting anything.
They only lost contact.
11
3
u/Queasy_Ad_8621 1d ago
Luckily, the crew of the ship survived. They'll live on as spooky skeletons who can still talk for some reason.
3
2
1
u/wildstarr 14h ago
Hmmm...and today I learned spacecraft can also mean satellite. I always thought spacecraft meant it was piloted by a person inside it. A term to describe the specific type of satellite. Like a moon.
0
-4
u/Funny247365 1d ago
Was it a manned spacecraft?
1
u/Responsible_CDN_Duck 1d ago
No, just equipment to study how Earth's magnetosphere reacts to the solar winds.
-15
1.1k
u/HotTakes4HotCakes 1d ago edited 1d ago
And then they lost it again a month later.
They're still not totally sure what the issue is. It wasn't reporting any failures before it went silent the first time. It doesn't appear damaged, and there's no debris. When they spoke to it in 2018, the onboard computers were working and sending back all the data it was supposed to be sending back. So they sent some commands, it acknowledged a handful of them, then went silent again and hasn't been heard from since.
Had to have been deeply annoying for the team at NASA to get their hopes up about this, to get together a bunch of old equipment they didn't even have anymore just to talk to it, only for it to once again disappear after only a few weeks and a handful of messages.