Silent For Six Decades, NASA's Long-Lost Satellite Sends Powerful Radio Signal To Earth

Last Updated:June 22, 2025, 21:50 IST

The signal lasted less than 30 nanoseconds but, for a brief moment, it was brighter than anything else in the radio sky

The signal was detected on 13 June by researchers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder.

A NASA satellite that had been inactive for over sixty years has unexpectedly sent a powerful radio signal back to Earth, leaving scientists both surprised and intrigued.

The signal was detected on 13 June by researchers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). It lasted less than 30 nanoseconds but, for a brief moment, it was brighter than anything else in the radio sky.

Scientists later traced the signal to Relay 2, a NASA communications satellite launched in 1964 as part of the Relay programme. The satellite was last used in 1965, and by 1967, all of its systems were believed to be non-functional. It had remained silent ever since — until now, according to weekly science and technology publication, New Scientist.

“If it’s nearby, we can study it through optical telescopes really easily, so we all got excited, thinking maybe we’d discovered a new pulsar or some other object," said Clancy James, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia.

“This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time," James added.

Further analysis revealed the source of the flash was just 20,000 kilometres from Earth — the altitude of Relay 2’s orbit. The burst was not from the satellite’s systems suddenly powering on, but most likely caused by an external event, such as an electrostatic discharge or a micrometeorite impact.

Karen Aplin, a physicist at the University of Bristol, noted that the detection may offer a new way to study electrostatic discharges in space, which could become increasingly useful as more small satellites are launched.

“In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space," Aplin noted.

The findings have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is already available on arXiv.

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News world Silent For Six Decades, NASA's Long-Lost Satellite Sends Powerful Radio Signal To Earth