Launching $125,000 into space

Science
Launching 5,000 into space
The ISEE-3 spacecraft.
The ISEE-3 spacecraft.

With three days still left to go on their crowdfunding campaign, the hackers behind the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project who wanted to recover the ISEE-3 spacecraft and return it to service, have passed their funding goal.

The project team is still looking for further funding however — another $25,000 — so they can use NASA’s Deep Space Network to range the spacecraft, and their crowdfunding campaign has been extended for another week to help reach that “stretch goal.”

Right now the team is waiting for the Space Act Agreement with NASA to be forwarded to the lawyers for final review — it should be signed in the next day or two — before proceeding. But at least at the moment they’re on track to make first contact with the spacecraft as early as the start of next week.

While the Morehead State University 21-meter dish will act as the primary ground station during the mission to reboot communications, until mid-July — when the spacecraft is within 2 to 3 million km of the Earth — it doesn’t have the power to establish a two-way communications link. The first attempt to contact the spacecraft will therefore be from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Contacting the spacecraft as early as possible is crucial as every day that passes the ISEE-3 moves a quarter million miles (roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon) closer to Earth, and each day that passes increases the the length of the burn — and hence the fuel — needed to make the necessary trajectory correction to position the probe into an orbit where it can produce some interesting science.

4 thoughts on “Launching $125,000 into space

  1. Launching $125,000 into space | Salute says:

    […] Read more on MAKE […]

  2. Lancement de $ 125,000 dans l’espace | TechLab LR says:

    […] … lire la suite (en anglais) […]

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker and tinkerer, who is spending a lot of his time thinking about the Internet of Things. In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and contributed to the detection of what was—at the time—the most distant object yet discovered.

View more articles by Alasdair Allan

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK