NASA IMAGE Status report 28 August 2018

IMAGE has returned to the quiet mode it suffered in the early spring, despite the efforts of personnel at NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

APL engineers have been unable to lock on to the spacecraft to receive telemetry nor command the spacecraft. In addition, the spacecraft’s downlink signal is shifting rapidly, suggesting a problem with a part of the spacecraft that controls the oscillation of its signal.

The IMAGE team has been attempting to command IMAGE to modify its signal “in the blind” — i.e., without locking on to the spacecraft to determine whether it has received the signal — to troubleshoot the source of the problem, without success so far.