ISEE-3 Reboot Project Status and Schedule for First Contact
Dennis Wingo: Today’s update regards the progress of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project team in our preparations to contact the spacecraft. We started this effort 32 days ago on on April 12, 2014. Below is what we have accomplished in that time – and the challenges that lie ahead.
Technical Progress
The Learning Curve
Perhaps the toughest part of doing something like this in a very limited timespan is to climb the learning curve – and to do so with a spacecraft you knew very little about. Early on we did a preliminary evaluation of the spacecraft and its systems so as to better understand it. This was a long jump into deep water. As we did with our Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (concerns the 1960s era Lunar Orbiter spacecraft) the search for ISEE-3 documents has been intense and not without failure.
Most of the best information that we have been able to find has been from the people who worked on the project in the 1980’s when the spacecraft was fully operational. After its baseline mission, ISEE-3 was repurposed and rechristened as the International Cometary Explorer (ICE).
