Last week, an amateur astronomer named Scott Tilley made headlines after finding a NASA satellite that had been lost for over a decade. The IMAGE satellite, which was meant to study the magnetosphere, was launched in 2000, and lost contact with Earth back in 2005.
Tilley, who uses radio equipment to track objects whose orbits are undisclosed, rediscovered it on January 20, while looking for something completely different.By finding IMAGE, Tilley has returned an important instrument to NASA’s interstellar toolbox. But he’s also added himself to a long-standing pantheon. Ever since the first satellites were launched, amateur astronomers have played a vital role in keeping tabs on them. In fact, when the Soviet satellite Sputnik I took the United States by surprise in October of 1957, legions of practiced volunteers were ready to track it, armed only with enthusiasm, low-power telescopes, and a good sense of timing.
These volunteers were part of Operation Moonwatch, a massive citizen science project started by Fred Whipple, then the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whipple dreamed up the project to coincide with the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY), during which scientists around the globe worked with and against each other to learn more about how our planet is composed. As part of the IGY, the United States and the Soviet Union both planned to launch the world’s first artificial satellites.
The launch was only about half the problem, though. Once the satellites were up there, scientists would have to find them again—a difficult proposition. The Astrophysical Observatory was already at work on a series of instruments, called Baker-Nunn cameras, that would be able to follow and photograph objects in orbit, but first, someone had to figure out where to point them. As the radio astronomer John P. Hagen put it to the Los Angeles Times in 1956, “Suppose some joker flies a plane up to 60,000 feet and throws out a golf ball… Can you find the golf ball? That’s about the task in locating the satellite.”
But Whipple had an idea. “From the start, Whipple planned that the professionally manned Baker-Nunn stations would be complemented by teams of dedicated amateurs,” W. Patrick McCray writes in his history of Operation Moonwatch. These amateurs would intercept and track the satellites’ paths through space, reporting exactly where in the sky they showed up, and when. After that, as The New York Times explained, “A giant computer, or ‘electronic brain,’ at Cambridge will digest the information and predict where the satellite can be seen again at any time for the next year or so,” allowing camera stations to get ahead of the satellites and do their work.
Whipple knew from the beginning that such a project would require large groups of volunteers, and that many of them would be young people. In late 1956, he placed an article in The Saturday Review soliciting participants. The satellite launches of the IGY would include “thousands of men and women of all hues, creeds and ideas,” he wrote. They would be contributing to a task so new, it didn’t even have a name. (He suggested “PLORB,” because it involved “placing” artificial moons in “orbit,” but this did not quite catch on.)
Whipple brought on a couple of recruiters, settled on the better name of “Moonwatch,” and began building up teams of volunteers in locations across the U.S. Groups eventually formed in other countries as well, including South Africa and Peru.
Generally, the setup worked like this: Teams brought out a bunch of low-power telescopes, which they’d either built themselves or bought for about $50 each. Each of these telescopes pointed down at a small mirror, arranged to reflect the sky above, so that viewers could watch the heavens for hours without craning their necks. The Moonwatchers lined up…
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