so in time to prevent the total loss of the frozen hydrogen used to cool the primary science instrument. Attempts to recover control of the spacecraft were successful, though as a result of the coolant loss no science data were obtainable. Mission A design flaw in the spacecraft control electronics caused the telescope dust cover to eject prematurely in its first few hours on-orbit, exposing the telescope to the Earth. In normal operations, the telescope would avoid pointing at the Earth as well as the Sun because the heat load was too high for the cryogenic cooling. At this early stage in the mission, the telescope was deliberately pointed at the Earth for safety under the assumption that the dust cover was present. The influx of power into the telescope caused the solid hydrogen cryostat to boil off all of its cryogen. The cryostat was designed to non-propulsively vent small amounts of gaseous hydrogen as the instruments were cooled. However, due to the unexpected heating, the vent began expelling gas at rates orders of magnitude higher than designed. The over-active vent acted as an uncontrolled, off-axis thruster. Eventually, the attitude control system was unable to counter the thrust of the cryostat vent, and the spacecraft began to spin. By the time the hydrogen supply was exhausted, the spacecraft was spinning as fast as 60 rpm. As the thrust finally abated, spacecraft engineers were able to re-establish attitude control. However, with the cryogen gone, the science instrument was no longer functional and the original science mission ended. In order to salvage some functionality from the US$73 million spacecraft, operations were redirected after the failure of the cryogenic system to an alternate science mission using the undamaged onboard star tracker for long-term monitoring of bright stars in support of an asteroseismology program. This redirection of mission was proposed by Derek Buzasi, who was not affiliated with the WIRE team, but whose research interests included asteroseismology and detector design, and who was at the time an Assistant Research Scientist on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph project at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The technique of asteroseismology aims to measure very low-amplitude oscillations in nearby stars to probe their structure. While the star tracker had poor spatial resolution, having been designed primarily for a wide field of view and detection of the brightest stars, it was above the atmosphere and