ISEE-3 Propulsion System Awakens at 11th Hour, Space News
“If ISEE-3 makes it back to Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1, Cowing and Wingo plan to command the spacecraft from mission control McMoons: an abandoned McDonald’s on the Campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Besides raking in more heliophysics data, Cowing and Wingo want to give the general public, students in particular, a chance to learn firsthand about Earth-sun interactions, and spacecraft operations.”
Engines on 36-Year-Old NASA Probe, NBC
“An old NASA spacecraft under the control of a private team fired its thrusters on Thursday for the first time in a generation. NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe, or ISEE-3, which the agency retired in 1997, performed the maneuver in preparation for a larger trajectory correction next week. The spacecraft hadn’t fired its engines since 1987, ISEE-3 Reboot Project team members said.”
An old workhorse satellite spins back up, The Economist
“In the month since re-waking ISEE-3, and with the assistance of both Arecibo and the global Deep Space Network (DSN), that team has been testing command responses and poking gently at the instrumentation on board. Doing so is not easy. The original control code is long gone, so the team has had to improvise their own. The satellite lacks any program storage: each command to be executed must be sent one at a time and acknowledged for the group to be sure they can proceed to the next step.”