REAL LIFE NEWS: REVIVING AN OBSOLETE SATELLITE
by Hazed
What happens when a satellite reaches the end of its useful life? Sometimes, the satellite owners steer it back towards Earth where it burns up on re-entry (with any luck – dying satellites have been known to scatter chunks of debris across the surface of the planet.)
But some satellites are just abandoned, left to continue their orbits as lifeless bodies.
Now a team of amateur enthusiasts is trying to revive one such abandoned satellite, and they have managed to make contact with it.
The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) probe was launched in 1978 and was designed to study the Sun’s magnetosphere and act as an early warning system for solar storms. Then in 1983 it was given a new job, and was sent through the tail of Halley’s Comet – the first man-made object to pass through a comet’s tail.
Since then, it’s been left to its own devices. Now some of the original engineers who worked with the probe have teamed up with a company called SkyCorp, who design spacecraft, and they are trying to contact the probe and get it back under control so it can resume its original mission.
The equipment which was used to communicate with the ISEE-3 back when it was active no longer exists, having been dismantled ages ago. So the team raised cash using crowdsourcing so they could build radio equipment and buy some time on Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.
The good news is that last week, they picked up their first signals from ISEE-3. Now they have to establish two-way communication so they can give it instructions. If they are successful, they can tell it to use the remaining propellant in its tanks to achieve a parking orbit in its original position, from whence it can start sending back solar data from its sensors.
They’re going to need some more crowdsourced cash in order to achieve their goal because they’ll need to buy time on NASA’s Deep Space Network communications grid. If you want to contribute to the project, and help get this spacecraft back online, go to the ISEE-3 Reboot Project’s website here.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/20/space_hackers_prepare_to_reactivate_antiquated_spacecraft/
Stop Press: It’s alive! The team has now had a response to its commands:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/30/its_alive_isee3_responding_to_commands/
