They do everything from monitoring the weather to enabling GPS, they’re a vital part of TV broadcasting and they’re regularly conducting scientific research.

So it’s easy to forget that satellites are still a relatively new invention.

In fact, the first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) was launched in 1957, paving the way for the serious innovation that forms a cornerstone of our day to day lives, just 67 years later.

While Sputnik 1 only managed to communicate for 22 days, after which point its batteries ran out and it eventually re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated just a few months later, incredibly a satellite launched not too long after is still in space.

Moreover, it still occasionally communicates with Earth.

The Lincoln Experimental Satellite (LES)-1 launched just eight years after Sputnik 1, in February 1965.

The intention of the Lincoln satellites was to support US military communications infrastructure, and LES-1 was a central part of that crucial innovation.

After two years, LES-1 was thought to be at the end of its life, and as a result, transmission was shut down in 1967, after which point the satellite presumably lived a peaceful, albeit lonely existence, orbiting our planet.

But then in 2012, something strange happened, when amateur radio operators working at the ultrahigh 237 MHz detected an unusual sound, with even more unusual origins.

Found to be a transmission from LES-1, a satellite that had supposedly been ‘dead’ for 45 years, science had a field day trying to figure out why the satellite had emitted a sound after decades, with the common hypothesis being that it was the result of the satellite’s ageing electronics.

So that was that, and no one expected to hear a peep from LES-1 again. But the Lincoln Laboratory had their interest piqued, and built a system to record signals from LES-1, just in case. And the results were astounding, as MIT’s Navid Yazdani explained in a statement:

“LES-1 is one of the oldest satellites in space and part of Lincoln Laboratory’s legacy in SATCOM [satellite communications], so to see it still transmitting after all these years is remarkable. LES-1 introduced several innovative SATCOM technologies and techniques for its time, and lessons learned during the launch and testing of LES-1 enabled engineers to refine the design of subsequent experimental satellites that paved the way for future military and civil systems.”

The continued results from LES-1 just shows how incredible an innovation the early satellites were.

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