NASA finds lost IMAGE satellite thanks to an amateur astronomer and is not sure that communications will be possible (configuration management issue?):
Quoting:
"NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it. Vanished IMAGE now found. Don't suppose anyone kept a copy of its comms code?"
(...)
"The Goddard boffins next need to undertake what the agency called “significant reverse-engineering” to capture and analyse data from the signal.
“The challenge to decoding the signal is primarily technical,” the announcement said. “The types of hardware and operating systems used in the IMAGE Mission Operations Centre no longer exist, and other systems have been updated several versions beyond what they were at the time”.
If NASA can decode data from the satellite, it will then try to turn on the science payload “to understand the status of the various science instruments”, and make a decision about IMAGE's future."
Update (2018-01-31) - Additional source for the same news:
