Hey all, I suspect that many of you, like me, are followers of space exploration so I thought this might interest you:

http://spacecollege.org/isee3/isee-3-re ... tives.html

It's a plan by a bunch of amateurs and ex-NASA people to re-activate an old space probe that's been in hibernation for nearly twenty years. ISEE-3 is a solar probe originally intended to study solar physics and was launched in 1978. In the early 80s it was sent to investigate a comet, and was actually the first probe to make a close encounter with a comet. It beat the fleet of spacecraft investigating Halley's Comet by a few months. After that encounter it was put into a looping orbit that takes it back to Earth in 2014.

ISEE-3 stopped doing any science in 1997 and has not been contacted since 2008, but is apparently still in good condition. It had plenty of fuel and only one of its science instruments had broken down. Unfortunately NASA don't consider it cost-effective to reactivate the mission, so the ISEE-3 Reboot Project was founded.

The goal is to contact and command ISEE-3, using new software and equipment to replace old hardware NASA has gotten rid of, and then bring the probe back into Earth orbit. If that all goes well, and the science equipment still works, then data from ISEE-3 will all be made public. Even though it is an old spacecraft and the equipment is dated, it should still be able to produce credible science. The team has already confirmed that ISEE-3's beacon is still active and they are close to being able to communicate with it. But it's a race against time because after about mid-June it will no longer be possible to get it back into Earth orbit.

I think this is a cool story and a worthwhile project.

_________________
Poka King of the south east.