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A group of crowd-funded amateurs, students, and NASA retirees are on the cusp of resurrecting and possibly taking control of a disused NASA spacecraft that has been coasting around the solar system since the days of disco.
On 21 May, NASA said it would allow the group to contact the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), which studied space weather after its launch in 1978 and went on to study two comets. NASA stopped operating the spacecraft in 1997, but through the years the plucky probe has kept broadcasting a carrier signal.
The group, called the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, is installing a radio amplifier at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Sometime in the next few days, some of its members will use the powerful radio dish to try and exchange "tones" with the spacecraft. That handshake would be a first step toward regaining control of the spacecraft. In the subsequent weeks, the group would check the spacecraft's vital signs and attempt to move it into a new orbit.
Mission control would be from an abandoned McDonald's at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, says Keith Cowing, a co-director of the project and the editor of the website NASA Watch. Cowing says that the project shows how there can still be value left in projects that NASA deems worthy of discarding. "They left gas in the gas tank and the keys in the ignition," he says. NASA is not paying for any part of the project, and the group has crowd-funded its effort. By May 23, the project had raised more than $150,000. Cowing says that the money pays for radio transmission equipment, rental time on radio telescope networks to track the spacecraft, and travel for team members.
If it all works, it will be a vindication for Robert Farquhar, the 81-year-old who was the mission's original flight director. He has been advocating to revive ISEE-3 for years and notes that it still has plenty of fuel left. He believes that most of the spacecraft's 13 instruments should still be working. Farquhar wants to use the remaining fuel, along with a lunar swing-by in August, to redirect the spacecraft to an encounter with comet 46P/Wirtanen in 2018. "I think there's definite value," he says.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 27 2014, @02:13PM
"NASA sucked every last bit of use out of it"
The whole point of the discussion is they haven't, and a cometary pass is likely in its near future if all goes well.
What we have here is pathological risk aversion. Volunteers don't have to worry about their kids starving homeless and without medical care if the experiment fails, they'll just go back to playing golf in retirement or whatever their unrelated day job is. "Publish or perish" scientists and their managers do have to worry about that unless it all goes pix perfect or at least they can't be personally blamed. Its too dangerous to their careers to attempt an experiment, although someone post-career or career-less could safely run the experiment.
This is combined with downsizing and downscaling disease where the ability to do something "extra" implies someone in management failed to downsize or lied about downsizing or whatever, so there's coverup and corruption involved if NASA could do it. Supervisor #52156 is such a bastard, he lied when he said his budget couldn't be cut one penny more, look he's doing something extra/new, I was honest when I got my cuts so my team can't support the new idea, so fire that crook and promote me! This is unfortunately the most likely outcome for anyone who supports the experiment in an official capacity.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday May 28 2014, @10:23AM
Yes, but flinging a coffee table past a comet isn't USEFUL. This thing doesn't have the capabilities to tell us anything we didn't know.
Success or failure has the same result... Nothing gained. Volunteers can tolerate failure, but their idea of success may also be utterly worthless, which it is in this case.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.