[6][7] NASA made attempts to communicate with the spacecraft and determine its payload status, but has had to track down and adapt old hardware and software to the current systems.

From its distant orbit, the spacecraft produced a wealth of images of the previously invisible region of space in the inner magnetosphere, exceeded all its scientific goals.

A senior review in 2005, just previous to its loss, described the mission as "extremely productive",[11] having confirmed several theoretical predictions (e.g. plasmasphere plumes, pre-midnight ring-current injection, and continuous antiparallel reconnection), discovered numerous new and unanticipated phenomena (e.g. plasmasphere shoulders, subauroral proton arcs, and a secondary interstellar neutral atom stream), and answered a set of outstanding questions regarding the source region of kilometric continuum radiation, the role of solar wind pressure pulses in ionospheric outflow, and the relationship between proton and electron auroras during substorms.

The 30.4-nm feature is relatively easy to measure because it is the brightest ion emission from the plasmasphere, it is spectrally isolated, and the background at that wavelength is negligible.

Finally, the GEO instrument observes the distribution of the geocoronal emission, which is a measure of the neutral background density source for charge exchange in the magnetosphere.

The FUV instrument complement looks radially outward from the rotating IMAGE satellite and, therefore, it spends only a short time observing the aurora and the Earth during each spin (120-seconds period).

Detailed descriptions of the WIC, SI, GEO, and their individual performance validations can be found in the January 2000 issue of the Space Science Reviews.

The HENA sensor consists of alternately charged deflection plates mounted in a fan configuration in front of the entrance slit, three Microchannel plate detectors (MCP), a solid-state detector (SSD), two carbon-silicon-polyimide foils (one at the entrance slit, the other placed just in front of the back MCP), and a series of wires and electrodes to steer secondary electrons ejected from the foils (or the SSD) to the MCPs.

HENA determines the velocity of the ENAs that it detects by measuring their time of flight (ToF) and trajectory through the sensor (from the entrance slit either to the back foil and two-dimensional imaging MCP detector or to the SSD.

When an incoming ENA passes through the entrance foil, it produces secondary electrons, which are accelerated and steered to the front imaging MCP.

In the first case, secondary electrons ejected from the back foil trigger a stop pulse in the 2-D imaging MCP, which also registers the position of the incident ENA.

The start and stop pulses give the ENA's time of flight, while the position measurements reveal its trajectory and thus its path length within the sensor.

A second technique uses the pulse height of the MCP signal to distinguish between oxygen and hydrogen, the two most common neutral atoms expected in the magnetosphere.

The objectives of LENA are to: (1) measure neutrals without interference from electrons, ions or UV; (2) distinguish neutral protons from oxygen; (3) determine ion outflow on five minute time scales over broad range of local times; and, (4) measure energies as low as 10 eV with high counting statistics.

MENA is a slit-type imager designed to detect energetic neutral hydrogen and oxygen atoms with energies ranging from 1 to 30 keV.

It monitors instrument health and safety and receives and processes the raw sensor data, producing one image every two minutes (i. e. each spacecraft spin period).

Every five minutes, an image was built from the returned radio signals that will contain information about the direction, speed and density of distant plasma clouds.

[18]: 14  Over the following days and weeks, commands were sent "blind" to reset the transmitter, change antennas, and otherwise attempt to re-establish contact with the spacecraft, but no signal (not even an unmodulated carrier wave) was received.

[19]: 9–10  An attempt to observe the craft's temperature to determine if it was completely dead or consuming the power expected in safe mode was inconclusive.

[19]: 10–11 A careful failure analysis revealed that, among plausible causes for an abrupt bidirectional loss of communication, the Solid State Power Converter (SSPC) for the transponder had, among its features, an "instant trip" shutdown in response to a high-current (100 A) short circuit.

[19]: 1,12–13,22,29–31 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.

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),[19]: 1,13  but they were able to recover.

[6] 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.

[24] Two days later, Burley reported that engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) successfully acquired the signal,[25] and confirmed on 30 January 2018 that IMAGE is the source.

If NASA can regain control of the spacecraft, and the status of data and ground systems can be assessed, it will decide if it can fund a mission restart.

[9] On 4 March 2018, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University reported detecting the signal from the satellite, but it was too faint to lock onto.

[31] On 28 August 2018, NASA announced that the IMAGE team had stopped receiving any signals from the satellite, as previously happened in winter,[31] and would continue to try sending commands.