Because it was undocumented the spacecraft's hardware and software had no provision for attempting to reset the SSPC if it reported good status. This would result in the observed symptoms: no radio communication with an apparently undamaged spacecraft. Although such a short circuit would be almost impossible without fatal damage to the spacecraft, the shutdown could be falsely triggered by a radiation-induced single event upset. It could be simply fixed by power-cycling the supply, but the spacecraft design left no way to send such a command, nor was one built in. The same problem with the same model of power supply had affected the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellites (launched after IMAGE), but they were able to recover. In January 2006, NASA declared the mission over, declaring that "Preliminary analysis indicated the craft's power supply subsystems failed, rendering it lifeless". Despite this, they continued to try and establish contact. In early 2006, NASA convened a board of experts to figure out what went wrong. After several months they created a report in which they theorized that IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and might fix itself. It was hoped that an eclipse when the spacecraft passed through the Earth's shadow in October 2007 would result in a sufficiently deep supply voltage sag that it would trigger a total bus reset, which would cause a power cycle of the suspect supply. However, attempts to contact the craft after this eclipse were not successful. Recovery efforts On 20 January 2018 IMAGE was found by Canadian radio amateur and satellite tracker Scott Tilley to be broadcasting, and he reported it to NASA. He had been scanning the S-band (microwaves) in the hopes of finding the Zuma satellite. On 24 January 2018, Richard Burley of NASA reported that they were trying to establish communication with the satellite using the NASA DSN. Two days later, Burley reported that engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) successfully acquired the signal, and confirmed on 30 January 2018 that IMAGE is the source. It is not known when the satellite started broadcasting, but re-examination of old data recorded by Tilley and fellow satellite tracker Cees Bassa showed transmissions from the same satellite in October 2016 and May 2017. Bassa hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse did not manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably sometime between 2014 and 2016.