WASHINGTON – It travels back through space, but also back through time, and a group of veteran scientists are determined to save it: a lonely satellite from the disco age, sailing home without a mission.
The International Sun-Earth Explorer, or ISEE-3, was built in 1978 to study the physics of solar winds.
In 1981, the spacecraft was sent on a new mission on a wide orbit in search of comets, and now it is flying blind and NASA has written off it as dead.
However, as he approaches Earth again, some scientists want to return him to his original work, including Robert Farquhar, now in his 80s, who was responsible for being taking it over in the first place.
Farquhar’s dream inspired a rescue team, many of them former engineers like himself who are still familiar with mid-20th century satellite technology.
But this band of space lovers will not find a place easily.
“This is a spaceship from the time of the disco. Your toaster is softer than this,” said Keith Cowing, co-director of the project to restart ISEE-3.
“The original hardware and software no longer exists. You need that to talk to the spacecraft,” Cowing told AFP, explaining how they had to scan tons of old files. – “mostly sitting in people’s garages.”
Veterans Scientists, Youngest Geeks Collaboration
“There are a lot of people on our team in their 70s and 80s who originally worked on this,” said Cowing, along with more younger “geeks” in their 20s and 30s.
So far, they have successfully detected and received signals from the spacecraft.
The next step is to send a message to ISEE-3, see if it hears and can respond, and then tell “the spacecraft to do something, and ask the spacecraft to do something. “
Cowing said there is about a 50-50 chance that all of this will work.
“Since this spaceship has been extinct since 1978, imagine you have a TV set, leave it on.”
“It still works; it sends a radio signal,” he said.
But this is another level of complexity, he warned, “firing the rockets and putting them into orbit.”
‘Cause we can. It’s cool. ‘
If all goes according to plan, the “citizen scientists” will try the project, some voluntarily their time and equipment, some who have paid out more than $ 142,000. was built on a crowdfunding website, trying to get the spacecraft into new orbit by mid-August.
After that, they try to get the old scientific instruments back.
But why bother to renovate a decades-old satellite?
Cowing said a big part of the answer is, “because we can. It’s cool.”
Furthermore, he said, “the spacecraft has a lot of original scientific potential. It can provide data that is really useful.”
Princeton professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Jeremy Kasdin suggested that perhaps a better question is: “Why not?”
Yes, a modern satellite might do the job better.
“But it’s not like we’re going around and building a much more capable satellite,” because NASA is working on different priorities, said Kasdin, who is not affiliated with this project.
NASA itself cannot afford to keep their old projects going.
“So if there’s an opportunity that comes with ‘finding another way to fund an older mission,’ that’s always better than it isn’t. It’s data rather than data.”
And even if the instruments no longer work well, the effort could still provide useful information about what will happen to a spacecraft after 30-plus years “flying around in the radiation environment of the system sun inside, ”Kasdin noted.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2014