An old NASA spacecraft under the control of a private team fired its thrusters on Thursday for the first time in a generation. 
 
 NASA's International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe, or ISEE-3, which the agency retired in 1997, performed the maneuver in preparation for a larger trajectory correction next week. The spacecraft hadn't fired its engines since 1987, ISEE-3 Reboot Project team members said. 
 
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 An artist's conception shows the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), which became the Interplanetary Cometary Explorer. NASA 
 
 It took several attempts and days to perform the roll maneuver because ISEE-3 was not responding to test commands. But this time, controllers got in touch. They increased the roll rate from 19.16 revolutions per minute to 19.76 RPM, putting it within mission specifications for trajectory corrections. 
 
 "All in all, a very good day," co-leader Keith Cowing wrote in a blog post on the ISEE-3 Reboot Project's website. 
 
 The recent maneuvers were commanded using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, through a command center in California. Cowing and his group are now gathering data from the spacecraft to get ready for its next contact with the Deep Space Network, a collection of NASA dishes the team is renting to get precise information on ISEE-3's location. 
 
 With the help of more than $150,000 raised via crowdfunding, the team reactivated the hibernating spacecraft a few weeks ago. ISEE-3 ceased operations in 1997 following a 19-year career that saw it perform a variety of missions, such as observing the sun and chasing comets. 
 
 ISEE-3 needs to be moved to put it in an advantageous position to communicate with Earth. Then the tem will see how well its 13 scientific instruments function. At least one instrument, the magnetometer, is working well enough to do science. "Recent magnetometer data shows recent solar event," the team said via Twitter. 
 
 — Elizabeth Howell, Space.com 
 
 This is a condensed version of a report from Space.com. Read the full report. Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter, or Space.com on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. ||||| ‘Citizen scientists’ take control of satellite abandoned by NASA in 1997 
 
 By Tom Boggioni 
 
 Friday, July 4, 2014 15:59 EDT 
 
 Having received the blessing of NASA, — and following a successful crowd-funding campaign — a group of ‘citizen scientists’ have taken control of an abandoned NASA satellite with plans to put it back to work again. 
 
 In May the National Aeronautics and Space Administration gave permission to the group to attempt to put the 36-year-old decommissioned International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft back into service for their own research purposes. 
 
 According to The Economist, the satellite team – which included the original mission’s flight dynamicist - successfully fired the craft’s propulsion system this week for the first time since 1987, pulling it out of a graveyard orbit around Earth and setting it on a usable course. 
 
 Provided with technical data from NASA, and working at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, the team of scientists, who go by the name of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, have been able to communicate with the satellite but have been hindered in their work since it does not possess the memory storage capabilities developed since 1978 . 
 
 According to the scientists and engineers, all commands must be sent one message at a time and then they must wait for an acknowledgement before proceeding to the next step. 
 
 Launched in 1978, the International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft studied how the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, the so-called solar wind, interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. 
 
 The group hopes their efforts will ignite interest in space exploration and research at an time when funding is drying up, as well as possibly having the satellite resume its original task of watching the sun. 
 
 The enthusiasts now plan to consult with NASA for its “authorization to proceed” for its next thruster firings. 
 
 [Image, artist's rendering via AFP] ||||| IN 1997 NASA sent a command that, after two decades of service, finally shut down ISEE-3, a satellite launched in 1978 that had done duty as both a solar observatory and a comet chaser. But, as Babbage reported on May 30th , rumours of its final death have proven greatly exaggerated. On that date, making use of the facilities at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico, a team of scientists and space buffs going by the name of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project managed to make contact with the dormant satellite, and tickle it back into life. 
 
 Yesterday, that same team of citizen scientists—including the original mission's flight dynamicist—fired the craft's propulsion system for the first time since 1987. It went off without a hitch, allowing the satellite to increase its rotation rate from 19.16 revolutions per minute (rpm) to 19.76 rpm. That is the rate mandated by the satellite's original specifications, and leaves it ready to perform other manoeuvres in future. 
 
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 In the month since re-waking ISEE-3, and with the assistance of both Arecibo and the global Deep Space Network (DSN), that team has been testing command responses and poking gently at the instrumentation on board. Doing so is not easy. The original control code is long gone, so the team has had to improvise their own. The satellite lacks any program storage: each command to be executed must be sent one at a time and acknowledged for the group to be sure they can proceed to the next step. 
 
 The project to revive the satellite has multiple purposes, one of them to ignite interest among the general population about space exploration and research at a time when the costs of launching objects into orbit around earth have fallen sharply . Last November, a high school put a satellite up, and it won't be the last. 
 
 Another is to show how modern tools, such as software-defined radios (in which a radio's capabilities are defined in computer software rather than in a specific piece of hardware), can be used in powerful ways that formerly required a massive capital infrastructure. These days, miracles can be accomplished with a small bit of radio hardware and a laptop. And the reboot will generate new scientific research. The first science data in 29 years was received days ago from the craft's magnetometer. (At 44 years old, the magnetometer is even more ancient than the rest of the craft: it is a prototype built for the Pioneer missions several years earlier.) 
 
 At this writing, the ISEE-3 is 6.28m km from Earth, and only a matter of days remain in which the right combination of maximum thrust, available fuel and orbital mechanics exist to nudge it into a new, stable orbit for its latest incarnation as a research mission. The exact details are still to be finalised, but one option is that it will resume its original task of watching the sun. The group will be consulting shortly with NASA for its "authorisation to proceed" for its next thruster firings. The old boat has some life in her yet.
– A satellite originally launched in 1978 is getting a new lease on life after NASA stopped using it. NASA shut down the satellite, called ISEE-3, in 1997, and it's been spinning uselessly around the sun for years. But a crowdfunded team of "citizen scientists" last month got NASA's permission to use it again for research, the Raw Story reports. In May, they were able to communicate with it, the Economist reports, and this week, they relaunched its propulsion systems. Now, it's once again rolling at its intended speed, the Economist notes, and the team plans to alter its trajectory next week, NBC News reports. So what will the experts do with it? For one thing, they're hoping to show off the power of modern technology: Tasks that once required giant infrastructures can now be achieved with software-based radios, the Economist notes. What's more, the experts are hoping to fuel renewed interest in space exploration.