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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 27 2014, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the round-and-round-it-goes dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:07AM (#48156)

    I did my dissertation on one of the experiments on ISEE-3/ICE. I don't recall there being any imagers on it. There are magnetometers and various cosmic ray particle detectors, all of which (fortunately) don't take up lots of data bandwidth.

    Commanding and controlling the spacecraft is one thing, but I wonder what they have in mind for collecting and handling data. NASA did the zero-level data handling, which I presume was to separate out the data for each of the experiments, package up the data, and send the data to the Principal Investigators. Do they know (or remember) how to do the zero-level processing? When we got our data, it was on tapes where the data were in overlapping segments. We had our own processing code to turn the data into useful data. Who is going to run those routines? Do the routines still exist?

    Let's say they are successful and send the spacecraft onto a cometary encounter. Who is going to process that data? Who can process the data? Who is going to have ownership of that data? It would take man-weeks, if not man-months to get the data processing reconstructed. Who is going to pay for that? I would LOVE to get some more particle data to analyze, but unless someone is going to send some money my way to work on it in any reasonable amount of time, it probably isn't going to happen.

    Fortunately, if they miss it as it comes by, all is not lost. It will be back in another 29 years or so and we can try again. :P