ISEE-3 Phone Home, You’re No Longer Lost in Space!

Amateur astro-engineers (a team of crowd funded students at Space College) took control of the vintage spacecraft called the International Sun-Earth Explorer, originally launched in 1978. How cool is that! The team worked together and created a software simulation of the outdated hardware needed to contact ISEE-3, and finally, reached out and touched the 36-year-old spacecraft. Getting it back into an Earth orbit is another challenge that will require an assessment of the spacecraft's overall health and refinement of the techniques required to fire its engines. But if the team is successful they could send ISEE-3 on new missions. Makes me wonder how many other purportedly defunct satellites, spacecraft, and space junk could be repurposed and made useful once again.