Connected to 'lost' spacecraft after 17 years

A group of scientists has officially reconnected with ISEE-3, the spacecraft that has been decommissioned for 17 years after the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) decided to hand over control of the spacecraft to them.

In an official announcement, scientists in the ISEE-3 Reboot project confirmed that they have established a two-way connection with the 36-year-old ship wandering in space.

Connection to ISEE-3 was successful.

The ISEE-3 spacecraft was launched in 1978 with the mission of studying the relationship between the Sun and Earth. It was assigned many missions over the next three decades. However, NASA decided to cut off contact with ISEE-3 in 1997.

It wasn’t until more than 10 years ago that NASA discovered that the spacecraft continued to orbit without receiving any commands from NASA. Why not reconnect with the spacecraft and assign it a new mission? However, the problem was that the antenna used to connect with ISEE-3 had been removed. Besides, to be able to connect would require a huge amount of funding. Therefore, NASA decided to assign the task of connecting with the lost spacecraft to amateur scientists.

A team of scientists from SkyCorp, SpaceRef, Space College Foundation and many other groups of scientists decided to take on this mission.

ISEE-3 Restart Project.

To carry out their project, a group of scientists passionate about astronomy organized a crowdfunding campaign. Initially, they set a goal of 100 thousand USD. However, by the end of the campaign, they had reached more than 150 thousand USD.

"Our plan is simple: We will contact the ISEE-3 spacecraft, fire its engines to bring it into low-Earth orbit, and then continue its original mission," said Keith Cowing, a former NASA engineer on the team.

To communicate with ISEE-3, the scientists had to rebuild the entire software that had been used to communicate with the spacecraft since the 1970s. That meant digging through a huge archive of old documents to find the original commands and reconstruct them.

Without support from NASA and with only a month or two before ISEE-3 reaches its closest approach to Earth's orbit this summer, scientists had a huge amount of work to do. But in the end, they succeeded.

And here's the important thing. What will they do next in the coming days, now that they've connected with ISEE-3?

"In the coming time, our team will assess the overall condition of the spacecraft, fine-tune the techniques needed to fire its engines and return it to low-Earth orbit," said a scientist on the Reboot team.

The docking with ISEE-3 was made at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, where scientists collaborated with a global network of astronomy enthusiasts to fund and run the project.

According to vietnamnet