They build makeshift spaceships out of cardboard boxes, turn out the lights, and presented to be in the vast expanse of space. The data will also provide information about the effects of the space environment on the 36-year old spacecraft.Most kids dream or talk about going into space and seeking out other life and befriending aliens at some point in their young lives. If the project is successful, any new data received from the probe will be shared with the science community and the public, which NASA officials say will provide a unique tool for educating students and the public about data gathering and spacecraft operations. Though NASA is not providing any funding for the project, the agency has shared technical information with the team to help them communicate with the ISEE-3 spacecraft. If the commands to reposition the ISEE-3 spacecraft are not sent by mid- June, the satellite will swing by the moon and continue to orbit the sun. The window for all this to work is short.
With the Space Act Agreement signed, the project's team will next try to "talk" to the space probe, using software to virtually emulate 1970s-era hardware that no longer exists. The ISEE-3 Reboot Project's team, which includes Robert Farquhar, the former NASA mission design specialist who was responsible for turning ISEE-3 into ICE 30 years ago, successfully heard from the spacecraft this week by using the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. To date, the effort has raised more than $140,000, $15,000 above their $125,000 goal. "If we are successful it may also still be able to chase yet another comet," the ISEE-3 Reboot Project team wrote as part of its crowdfunding campaign. (The satellite's 2014 approach to Earth was considered as a possible opportunity for its recovery and display.)īut armed with the knowledge from a 2008 data check that revealed all but one of the barrel-shaped spacecraft's experiments were still functioning, a private group stepped forward with a seemingly-simple plan: contact the probe, command it to fire its engines and reenter a halo orbit near the Earth, and then resume its original 1978 mission. ICE was then redirected to study coronal mass ejections from the sun, before being decommissioned in 1997, and although it was still in space, donated to the Smithsonian. The repurposed ISEE-3, renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), passed through the tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner, and then repeated the feat a year later with the famous Halley's Comet. ISEE-3, which in 1978 became the first satellite to enter a halo orbit at a gravity-stable Lagrange point between the Earth and the sun, made history again in 1985 as the first probe to visit a comet. "We have a chance to engage a new generation of citizen scientists through this creative effort to recapture ISEE-3 as it zips by the Earth this summer."Īrtist rendition of the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), which became the Interplanetary Cometary Explorer. "The intrepid ISEE-3 spacecraft was sent away from its primary mission to study the physics of the solar wind extending its mission of discovery to study two comets," John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. of Los Gatos, California, to allow the company and its partners Spaceref Interactive and the Space College Foundation to attempt to contact, and possibly command and control, the all-but-abandoned spacecraft. On Wednesday (May 21), NASA announced it had signed an agreement with Skycorp, Inc. Orbiting the sun ever since, it is now making its long-anticipated return to the vicinity of the Earth, where a newly-crowdfunded effort is gearing up to "reboot" the probe into service. The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) originally launched in 1978 to study solar wind before being diverted to chase after comets in the mid-1980s. A more than 35-year-old spacecraft that NASA once thought might be returned from space and put into the Smithsonian may instead soon resume its original mission thanks to the efforts of a private group.