After decades of silence, a vintage spacecraft says hello to Earth, Planetary Society
“A group of space enthusiasts and vintage hardware experts walk into a radio observatory. They contact a 36-year-old spacecraft to ask how it’s doing. The spacecraft responds and says it’s well. The group leaves and continues to stay in touch with the spacecraft from their laptops, working out of an old McDonald’s building at the NASA Ames Research Center. It’s no joke–that’s the latest news coming from the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, a crowdfunded effort to repurpose NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3), launched in 1978 on a mission to study Earth’s magnetosphere. In 1983, ISEE was sent on a new mission to study comets Giacobini-Zinner and Halley, and has been spent the past three decades circling the sun in roughly the same orbit as Earth.”
Radio Amateurs are Principal Players In Effort to Resurrect NASA Spacecraft, ARRL via eHam.net
“Not even an earthquake kept the ISEE-3 Reboot Project from contacting the 36-year-old International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 spacecraft — later repurposed, redirected, and renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) — on May 29 from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is a private crowd-funded group of engineers, programmers, and scientists — including several radio amateurs — that is trying to fire the old spacecraft’s engines to redirect its path. And that has to happen by June 17, according to Dennis Wingo, KD4ETA, one of the team members and the CEO of California-based Skycorp Incorporated.”
