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The International Cometary Explorer (ICE)
spacecraft A spacecraft is a vehicle or machine designed to fly in outer space. A type of artificial satellite, spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, Earth observation, meteorology, navigation, space colonization, ...
(designed and launched as the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3) satellite), was launched 12 August 1978, into a
heliocentric orbit A heliocentric orbit (also called circumsolar orbit) is an orbit around the barycenter of the Solar System, which is usually located within or very near the surface of the Sun. All planets, comets, and asteroids in the Solar System, and the Sun ...
. It was one of three spacecraft, along with the mother/daughter pair of ISEE-1 and ISEE-2, built for the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE) program, a joint effort by
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...
and ESRO/ ESA to study the interaction between the
Earth's magnetic field Earth's magnetic field, also known as the geomagnetic field, is the magnetic field that extends from Earth's interior out into space, where it interacts with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. The magneti ...
and the
solar wind The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona. This plasma mostly consists of electrons, protons and alpha particles with kinetic energy between . The composition of the sol ...
. ISEE-3 was the first spacecraft to be placed in a
halo orbit A halo orbit is a periodic, three-dimensional orbit near one of the L1, L2 or L3 Lagrange points in the three-body problem of orbital mechanics. Although a Lagrange point is just a point in empty space, its peculiar characteristic is that it ...
at the Earth-Sun
Lagrange point In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves the solution of t ...
. Renamed ICE, it became the first spacecraft to visit a
comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to release gases, a process that is called outgassing. This produces a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena ...
, passing through the plasma tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner within about of the nucleus on 11 September 1985. NASA suspended routine contact with ISEE-3 in 1997, and made brief status checks in 1999 and 2008. On 29 May 2014, two-way communication with the spacecraft was reestablished by the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, an unofficial group, with support from the Skycorp company and SpaceRef Interactive. On 2 July 2014, they fired the thrusters for the first time since 1987. However, later firings of the thrusters failed, apparently due to a lack of nitrogen pressurant in the fuel tanks. The project team initiated an alternative plan to use the spacecraft to "collect scientific data and send it back to Earth", but on 16 September 2014, contact with the probe was lost.


Original mission: International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)

ISEE-3 carries no cameras; instead, its instruments measure energetic particles, waves, plasmas, and fields. ISEE-3 originally operated in a
halo orbit A halo orbit is a periodic, three-dimensional orbit near one of the L1, L2 or L3 Lagrange points in the three-body problem of orbital mechanics. Although a Lagrange point is just a point in empty space, its peculiar characteristic is that it ...
about the Sun-Earth
Lagrange point In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves the solution of t ...
, 235 Earth radii above the surface (about . It was the first artificial object placed at a so-called "libration point", entering orbit there on 20 November 1978, proving that such a suspension between gravitational fields was possible. It rotates at 19.76 rpm about an axis perpendicular to the
ecliptic The ecliptic or ecliptic plane is the orbital plane of the Earth around the Sun. From the perspective of an observer on Earth, the Sun's movement around the celestial sphere over the course of a year traces out a path along the ecliptic agains ...
, to keep it oriented for its experiments, to generate solar power and to communicate with Earth. The purposes of the mission were: * to investigate solar-terrestrial relationships at the outermost boundaries of the Earth's magnetosphere; * to examine in detail the structure of the solar wind near the Earth and the shock wave that forms the interface between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere; * to investigate motions of and mechanisms operating in the plasma sheets; and, * to continue the investigation of cosmic rays and solar flare emissions in the interplanetary region near 1 AU.


Second mission: International Cometary Explorer

After completing its original mission, ISEE-3 was re-tasked to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere. On 10 June 1982, the spacecraft performed a maneuver which removed it from its halo orbit around the point and placed it in a transfer orbit. This involved a series of passages between Earth and the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, through the Earth's magnetotail. Fifteen propulsive maneuvers and five lunar gravity assists resulted in the spacecraft being ejected from the Earth-Moon system and into a
heliocentric orbit A heliocentric orbit (also called circumsolar orbit) is an orbit around the barycenter of the Solar System, which is usually located within or very near the surface of the Sun. All planets, comets, and asteroids in the Solar System, and the Sun ...
. Its last and closest pass over the Moon, on December 22, 1983, was only above the lunar surface; following this pass, the spacecraft was re-designated as the International Cometary Explorer (ICE).


Giacobini-Zinner encounter

Its new orbit put it ahead of the Earth on a trajectory to intercept comet Giacobini-Zinner. On 11 September 1985, the craft passed through the comet's plasma tail. ICE did a flyby of the comet nucleus at a distance of of the nucleus on 11 September 1985.


Halley encounter

ICE transited between the Sun and
Comet Halley Halley's Comet or Comet Halley, officially designated 1P/Halley, is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 75–79 years. Halley is the only known short-period comet that is regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and thus the on ...
in late March 1986, when other spacecraft were near the comet on their early-March comet rendezvous missions. (This "
Halley Armada The Halley Armada is the name of a series of space probes, five of which were successful, sent to examine Halley's Comet during its 1986 sojourn through the inner Solar System, connected with apparition "1P/1982 U1". The armada included one prob ...
" included
Giotto Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto ( , ) and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/ Proto-Renaissance period. G ...
, Vega 1 and 2, Suisei and
Sakigake , known before launch as MS-T5, was Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft, and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the USA or the Soviet Union. It aimed to demonstrate the performance of the new launch vehi ...
.) ICE flew through the tail; its minimum distance to the comet nucleus was . For comparison, Earth's minimum distance to Comet Halley in 1910 was .


Heliospheric mission

An update to the ICE mission was approved by NASA in 1991. It defines a heliospheric mission for ICE consisting of investigations of
coronal mass ejection A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a significant release of plasma and accompanying magnetic field from the Sun's corona into the heliosphere. CMEs are often associated with solar flares and other forms of solar activity, but a broadly accept ...
s in coordination with ground-based observations, continued
cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...
studies, and the Ulysses probe. By May 1995, ICE was being operated under a low duty cycle, with some data-analysis support from the Ulysses project.


End of mission

On 5 May 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, leaving only a carrier signal operating. The ISEE-3/ICE downlink bit rate was nominally 2048 bits per second during the early part of the mission, and 1024 bit/s during the
21P/Giacobini–Zinner Comet Giacobini–Zinner (officially designated 21P/Giacobini–Zinner) is a periodic comet in the Solar System. It was discovered by Michel Giacobini, who observed it in the constellation of Aquarius on December 20, 1900. It was recovered two ...
comet encounter. The bit rate then successively dropped to 512 bit/s (on 9 December 1985), 256 bit/s (on 5 January 1987), 128 bit/s (on 24 January 1989) and finally to 64 bit/s (on 27 December 1991). Though still in space, NASA donated the craft to the
Smithsonian Museum The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
. By January 1990, ICE was in a 355-day
heliocentric orbit A heliocentric orbit (also called circumsolar orbit) is an orbit around the barycenter of the Solar System, which is usually located within or very near the surface of the Sun. All planets, comets, and asteroids in the Solar System, and the Sun ...
with an
aphelion An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any ell ...
of 1.03 AU, a
perihelion An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any elli ...
of 0.93 AU and an inclination of 0.1°.


Further contact

In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal. On 18 September 2008, NASA, with the help of KinetX, located ICE using the
NASA Deep Space Network The NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) is a worldwide network of American spacecraft communication ground segment facilities, located in the United States (California), Spain (Madrid), and Australia (Canberra), that supports NASA's interplanetary ...
after discovering that it had not been powered off after the 1999 contact. A status check revealed that 12 of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still had enough propellant for of Δv. It was determined to be possible to reactivate the spacecraft in 2014, when it again made a close approach to Earth, and scientists discussed reusing the probe to observe more comets in 2017 or 2018.


ISEE-3 Reboot Project

Sometime after NASA's interest in the ICE waned, others realized that the spacecraft might be steered to pass close to another comet. A team of engineers, programmers, and scientists began to study the feasibility and challenges involved. In April 2014, its members formally announced their intentions to "recapture" the spacecraft for use, calling the effort the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. A team webpage said, "We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission... If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing". On 15 May 2014, the project reached its
crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by cro ...
goal of US$125,000 on RocketHub, which was expected to cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas. The project then set a "stretch goal" of US$150,000, which it also met with a final total of US$159,502 raised. The project members were working on deadline: if they got the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, or in early July by using more fuel, it could use the Moon's gravity to get back into a useful
halo orbit A halo orbit is a periodic, three-dimensional orbit near one of the L1, L2 or L3 Lagrange points in the three-body problem of orbital mechanics. Although a Lagrange point is just a point in empty space, its peculiar characteristic is that it ...
.


Replacing lost hardware

Earlier in 2014, officials with the
Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...
said the
NASA Deep Space Network The NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) is a worldwide network of American spacecraft communication ground segment facilities, located in the United States (California), Spain (Madrid), and Australia (Canberra), that supports NASA's interplanetary ...
equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and was too expensive to replace. However, project members were able to find documentation for the original equipment and were able to simulate the complex modulator/demodulator electronics using modern
software-defined radio Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that have been traditionally implemented in analog hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by ...
(SDR) techniques and open-source programs from the
GNU Radio GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined radios and signal-processing systems. It can be used with external RF hardware to create software-defined radios, or without ha ...
project. They obtained the needed hardware, an off-the-shelf SDR transceiver, and power amplifier, and installed it on the Arecibo dish antenna on 19 May 2014. Once they gained control of the spacecraft, the capture team planned to shift the primary ground station to the dish located at
Morehead State University Morehead State University (MSU) is a public university in Morehead, Kentucky. The university began as Morehead Normal School, which opened its doors in 1887. The Craft Academy for Excellence in Science and Mathematics, a two-year residential ...
Space Science Center of
Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia ...
. The dish antenna in Bochum Observatory,
Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...
, would be a support station. Although NASA was not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact. On 21 May 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable
Space Act Agreement Space Act Agreements (abbreviated SAA) are a type of legal agreement specified in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (and subsequent congressional authorizations) that uniquely empowers the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ...
with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project. "This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again", officials said.


Contact reestablished

On 29 May 2014, the reboot team successfully commanded the probe to switch into Engineering Mode to begin to broadcast telemetry. On 26 June 2014, project members using the
Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex The Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (GDSCC), commonly called the Goldstone Observatory, is a satellite ground station located in Fort Irwin in the U.S. state of California. Operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), its m ...
DSS-24 antenna achieved synchronous communication and obtained the four ranging points needed to refine the spacecraft's orbital parameters. The project team received approval from NASA to continue operations through at least 16 July 2014, and made plans to attempt the orbital maneuver in early July. On 2 July 2014, the reboot project fired the thrusters for the first time since 1987. They spun up the spacecraft to its nominal roll rate, in preparation for the upcoming trajectory correction maneuver in mid-July. On 8 July 2014, a longer sequence of thruster firings failed, apparently due to loss of the
nitrogen Nitrogen is the chemical element with the symbol N and atomic number 7. Nitrogen is a nonmetal and the lightest member of group 15 of the periodic table, often called the pnictogens. It is a common element in the universe, estimated at se ...
gas needed to pressurize the fuel tanks. On 24 July 2014, the ISEE-3 Reboot Team announced that all attempts to change orbit using the ISEE-3 propulsion system had failed. Instead, the team said, the ''ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission'' would gather data as the spacecraft flies by the Moon on 10 August 2014 and enters a heliocentric orbit similar to Earth's. The team began shutting down propulsion components to maximize the electrical power available for the science experiments. On 30 July 2014, the team announced that it still planned to acquire data from as much of ISEE-3's 300-day orbit as possible. With five of the 13 instruments on the spacecraft still working, the science possibilities included listening for
gamma-ray burst In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies. They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten millise ...
s, where observations from additional locations in the
Solar System The Solar System Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar ...
can be valuable. The team was also recruiting additional receiving sites around the globe to improve diurnal coverage, in order to upload additional commands while the spacecraft is close to Earth and later to receive data. On 10 August 2014 at 18:16 UTC, the spacecraft passed about from the surface of the Moon. It will continue in its heliocentric orbit, and will return to the vicinity of Earth in 2031.


Contact lost

On 25 September 2014, the Reboot team announced that contact with the probe was lost on 16 September 2014. It is unknown whether contact can be reestablished because the probe's exact orbit is uncertain. The spacecraft's post-lunar flyby orbit takes it further from the Sun, causing electrical power available from its solar arrays to drop, and its battery failed in 1981. Reduced power could have caused the craft to enter a safe mode, from which it may be impossible to awaken without the precise orbital location information needed to point transmissions at the craft.


Spacecraft design

The ICE spacecraft is a barrel-like cylindrical shape covered by solar panels. Four long antennas protrude equidistant around the circumference of the spacecraft, spanning . It has a dry mass of and can generate nominal power of 173 watts.


Payload

ICE carries 13 scientific instruments to measure plasmas, energetic particles, waves, and fields. , five were known to be functional. It does not carry a camera or imaging system. Its detectors measure high energy particles such as X- and gamma-rays, solar wind, plasma and cosmic particles. A data handling system gathers the scientific and engineering data from all systems in the spacecraft and formats them into a serial stream for transmission. The transmitter output power is five watts.


Scientific payload and experiments

* Cosmic Ray Electrons and Nuclei * Ground Based Solar Studies Experiment * Heavy Isotope Spectrometer Telescope * High Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment * Low Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment * Low Energy Proton Experiment, also known as the Energetic Particle Anisotropy Spectrometer (EPAS) * Medium Energy Cosmic Ray Experiment * Plasma Composition Experiment * Plasma Wave Instrument * Radio Mapping Experiment * Solar Wind Plasma Experiment, failed after 26 February 1980 * Vector Helium Magnetometer * X-Rays and Electrons Instrument


References


Publications

* * *


External links


ISEE-3/ICE profile
by NASA HEASARC
ISEE-3/ICE profile
by NASA Solar System Exploration
ISEE-3 Reboot Project homepage
at SpaceCollege.com
A Spacecraft for All
an interactive site created in cooperation with
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
to support the ISEE-3 Reboot Project {{Orbital launches in 1978 1978 in spaceflight Derelict space probes Artificial satellites at Earth-Sun Lagrange points Missions to comets NASA space probes Spacecraft launched in 1978 Explorers Program Articles containing video clips Spacecraft using halo orbits