Where organizations lose their interest—which is to say, funding—the crowd is there to step in. 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. An old, even distinguished, NASA spacecraft is coasting toward Earth, but NASA can't afford to bring it back online. That's why a couple of guys want to take on the “geeky endeavor” of bumping it back in to place—with as many 80 year olds as they can find and a satellite dish in Kentucky. 
 
 NASA's got a full plate and a shrinking budget, which makes reviving a spacecraft that was given up on decades earlier an unlikely proposition. So in the absence of an official effort, a couple of "citizen scientists" are going to see if they can wake it up on their own. Keith Cowing and Dennis Wingo are experienced technoarcheologists; alum of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, wherein they holed up in an old McDonalds and dug out some early photographs of the moon taken by orbiters 45 years earlier that had been stored on magnetic tape. So they're no strangers to old equipment, shoe-string budgets, and unexpected results, which is why they're ready and willing to see if they're able to wake up the ISEE-3. 
 
 Once upon a time, NASA was the one keeping an eye and a staff on the ISEE-3. In 1978, the space agency teamed up with the ESA and launched the third International Solar-Environment Explorer. It was the first spacecraft to monitor solar wind, while it was perched in orbit between the Sun and the Earth. 
 
 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. Also, in the same process, it left its old, solar-wind monitoring position behind. 
 
 In 1997, the ICE mission operations were terminated, although the spacecraft's on-board instrumentation was still working and there was still fuel available. NASA's Deep Space Network checked in with the ISEE-3 back in 2008, and its spacecraft's transmitter remains on, but that's all that's really known at this point. It had a second life as a comet hunter, though, so why not a third? 
 
 "It's the most cost-effective spacecraft we ever had and I'd like to make it even more cost-effective. It can do more missions," said Bob Farquhar, the "orbit maestro" who originally turned the ISEE-3 into the ICE and got America to a comet before any other country. 
 
 Just like in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the space probe is coming home. In August of this year, the ISEE-3/ICE will swing back by the Earth after nearly three decades of large, looping orbits around the Sun. Some believe that ISEE-3/ICE could be recycled again, and go back to being a solar-weather-observation platform, provided its thrusters are fired soon. 
 
 It's not that no one at the cash-strapped NASA of today believes it could be done, but reviving an old spacecraft is just not a project that can earn a line in the budget. 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. 
 
 Beyond tightening its belt, with all the changes in communications technology, NASA doesn't have the right equipment to reach the ICE. So even though its signal has been detected in Germany , Puerto Rico, and Kentucky, Houston can't say hi to its old friend. 
 
 In 2010, Garcia co-authored a paper in the journal Space Weather that said bringing ICE online was a perfect example of doing more with less, which is basically NASA's MO now. “The spacecraft carries 13 plasma, high-energy particle, field, and wave sensors, most of which were still functional as of 1999,” the article stated. “ISEE 3/ICE can serve many more purposes. Controlling this comparatively simple spacecraft, now well beyond warranty, would be an ideal training opportunity for young scientists and engineers.” 
 
 It's a compelling enough mission that Garcia isn't the only one eager not to let an opportunity pass by. NPR reports that a team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory wants to use their 18-meter satellite dish to communicate with the craft. They have NASA's blessing to try to assess ICE's condition. 
 
 But APL is another organization that has people it needs to answer to, Keith Cowing told me over the phone this morning, and truth be told, APL is perched between Baltimore and Washington DC—not the best place for signaling space. Hence the Cowing/Wingo collaboration with Morehead State. 
 
 "We've heard it, we've got a dish and now we're moving to listening and talking to it” 
 
 To free this project from budget concerns, they set up a crowdfunding page for rebooting the ISEE-3. The project has “a team of engineers, programmers, and scientists,” and Cowing told me they're tracking down everyone who was involved with the original program that's still alive. 
 
 Like the Hopkins team, they also has access to a large radio telescope fully capable of contacting ISEE-3 at Morehead State University in Kentucky. Still needs some funding though, hence the crowdfunding page that launched yesterday on Rockethub, where the difficulties ahead are outlined: 
 
 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. These are our two greatest challenges. The funding we seek will be used for things we have not already obtained from volunteers. We need to initiate a crash course effort to use 'software radio' to recreate virtual versions all of the original communications hardware that no longer physically exists. We also need to cover overhead involved in operating a large dish antenna, locating and analyzing old documentation, and possibly some travel. 
 
 It's easy enough to pick up the signal from the approaching ISEE-3, but they'd have to learn the language it speaks to say anything back. “We've heard it, we've got a dish and now we're moving to listening and talking to it,” Cowing said. “We'll have to recreate the hardware in silicon—in software radio—and recreate and find the language to fire the commands.” 
 
 So, sure, a quick emulator for a program, which was written in the 70s in fortran. Even if that ends up being possible, it's unclear what still works on the spacecraft and what it could be used for. Cowing described putting it back in its position perched between Earth and the Sun, where even if its instruments weren't able to monitor the solar wind again, it could be a target for future students to uncover, or could be used to calibrate radio telescopes on Earth. 
 
 Or maybe it's just an inspiration for others. When someone tells you that something can't done, that's when you grit your teeth and get going. “Another impossible project to pull off, lets go!” Wingo wrote on his Rockethub bio. 
 
 The stakes might be low, “If it's not successful, it'll just fly by,” Cowing said, “and we'll—well, Earth—will see it in 40 years.” 
 
 But 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 its got left? Never let an opportunity, or old spacecraft, pass you by. ||||| This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages. The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to.This is part of the Internet Archive's attempt to rid the web of broken links 
 
 These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. 
 
 Emily Lakdawalla • February 7, 2014 
 
 ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it 
 
 I've periodically reported on the status of the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3), a spacecraft that was launched in 1978 to study Earth's magnetosphere and repurposed in 1983 to study two comets. Renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), it has been in a heliocentric orbit since then, traveling just slightly faster than Earth. It's finally catching up to us from behind, and will return to Earth in August. It's still functioning, broadcasting a carrier signal that the Deep Space Network successfully detected in 2008. Twelve of its 13 instruments were working when we last checked on its condition, sometime prior to 1999. 
 
 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. In 1983, it became ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, and was sent on a new mission to study comets Giacobini-Zinner and Halley. The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) launched in 1978 on a mission to study Earth’s magnetosphere. In 1983, it became ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, and was sent on a new mission to study comets Giacobini-Zinner and Halley. 
 
 When I last reported on ISEE-3, I wrote: 
 
 A big question is whether we even still know how to communicate with the spacecraft. It was built in the 1970s, at the same time as the Voyagers. But we've been in continuous communication with the Voyagers since their launch; the same isn't true of ICE. So the first step is for a team at Goddard Space Flight Center to research that question. Can we figure out how to talk to ICE? What will those communications cost? 
 
 It's with great sadness that I report today that the Goddard Space Flight Center team has determined that we cannot, in fact, communicate with this spacecraft. Two days, ago, the following was posted on the ISEE3returns Facebook page: 
 
 Communication involves speaking, listening and understanding what we hear. One of the main technical challenges the ISEE-3/ICE project has faced is determining whether we can speak, listen, and understand the spacecraft and whether the spacecraft can do the same for us. Several months of digging through old technical documents has led a group of NASA engineers to believe they will indeed be able to understand the stream of data coming from the spacecraft. 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? Can we tell the spacecraft to turn back on its thrusters and science instruments after decades of silence and perform the intricate ballet needed to send it back to where it can again monitor the Sun? The answer to that question appears to be no. 
 
 
 
 The transmitters of the Deep Space Network, the hardware to send signals out to the fleet of NASA spacecraft in deep space, no longer includes the equipment needed to talk to ISEE-3. These old-fashioned transmitters were removed in 1999. Could new transmitters be built? Yes, but it would be at a price no one is willing to spend. And we need to use the DSN because no other network of antennas in the US has the sensitivity to detect and transmit signals to the spacecraft at such a distance. 
 
 
 
 This effort has always been risky with a low probability of success and a near-zero budget. It is thanks to a small and dedicated group of scientists and engineers that we were able to get as far as we have. Thank you all very much. 
 
 I followed up with Leonard Garcia, who has been one of the leaders of the attempt to regain control of ISEE-3, to ask what, in fact, the cost was. He told me that when the Deep Space Network realized what was going to be involved in regaining this capability, they did not even proceed as far as developing a cost estimate; "they decided this wasn't going to be possible." 
 
 How could this happen? Well, the fact that ISEE-3 is still broadcasting a carrier signal was actually an error; it should have been shut down. If they had planned for it to still be functioning at this point, they would have maintained the capability to communicate with it. I don't comprehend the intricacies of deep-space communications well enough to understand the obstacles here, and I don't question their conclusion, but that doesn't make me any less sad. 
 
 So ISEE-3 will pass by us, ready to talk with us, but in the 30 years since it departed Earth we've lost the ability to speak its language. I wonder if ham radio operators will be able to pick up its carrier signal -- it's meaningless, I guess, but it feels like an honorable thing to do, a kind of salute to the venerable ship as it passes by. 
 
 Emily Lakdawalla Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist for The Planetary Society 
 
 Read more articles by Emily Lakdawalla
– 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?"