It's true if there isn't money for a Veronica Mars movie, and it's true if the Mars Rover is taking up all of the space agency's cash and attention. Once upon a time, NASA was the one keeping an eye and a staff on the ISEE-3. NASA International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) launched in 1978 on a mission to study Earth’s magnetosphere. Whereas the first two ISEEs eventually reentered the Earth's atmosphere, the ISEE-3 stayed out there, and was granted a second life as the ICE: the International Cometary Explorer. As the Russians, Japanese, and the ESA were preparing to send probes to Halley's Comet as it passed in 1986, the newly christened ICE traversed the Giacobini-Zinner comet's tail in 1985, in the process becoming the first spacecraft to pass a comet, and the first to reach Comet Halley in 1986. NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) can listen to the spacecraft, a test in 2008 proved that it was possible to pick up the transmitter carrier signal, but can we speak to the spacecraft? A research scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Leonard Garcia, told the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla that agency's Deep Space Network didn't even bother to do a cost estimate on bringing the ISEE-3/ICE back online.
– A long-dormant satellite is heading back toward Earth this summer after 31 years, and some "citizen scientists" want to try to wake it up and put it back to work, reports Motherboard. Cash-strapped NASA hasn't shown much interest in investing money in the idea, hence the move toward crowdfunding to get the job done. The plan revolves around a satellite launched by NASA in 1978 called the International Sun-Earth Explorer, or ISEE-3. It was supposed to permanently hang out in the orbit between the sun and Earth to monitor solar wind, but another team at NASA sort of hijacked the satellite five years later to go comet-hunting. While ISEE-3 did great in its new duty, it had to leave its old orbit to do so and has been looping around the sun ever since. But the spacecraft makes a swing by Earth in August, raising the opportunity for its reboot—assuming all the technical logistics can be addressed. "In order to interact with the spacecraft we will need to locate the original commands and then develop a software recreation of the original hardware that was used to communicate with the spacecraft," explains that crowdfunding plea at Rockethub. A blog post at Planetary.org lays out the difficulties. Still, it's worth a shot, concludes Ben Richmond at Motherboard. "Given NASA's success rate at using spacecraft beyond their mission—the Voyagers, Kepler, etc— why not try to wake up the ISEE-3 and see what it's got left?"