Earlier this week, the ISEE-3 Reboot project reached an official agreement with NASA, the first time the agency has approved an outside team attempting to resurrect a spacecraft that it never planned to use again. Now, Cowing, Mingo, and their team have until mid-June to fire the thrusters, diverting it into an orbit close to Earth. If they fail, ISEE-3 will swing around the Moon instead, continuing its solar orbit. It will not near Earth again for decades.

Before ISEE-3 Reboot, the pair operated the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, a highly successful effort to recover lost photographs from 1960s lunar satellites. This experience, as well as their NASA connections, served them well: they were able to collect reference material from some of the original mission team. “Typically, after 30 or 40 years, your wife says, ‘Why don’t you throw that crap out?’ And you keep saying ‘It’ll be important someday!’ Well, it was,” Cowing says. “They kept many of the documents that were required to tell the spacecraft what to do, because a lot of them knew that it was coming back to Earth in 2014.” Software-defined radio could compensate for hardware that no longer existed, making it possible to speak to ISEE-3 once again.

NASA couldn’t fund a recovery mission, though it provided advice and documents to Winger and Cowing. But the public, it turned out, could. A crowdfunding campaign reached its goal of $125,000 after a month, ultimately getting over $150,000. With that money and direct equipment donations, the team got two power amplifiers and set up ground stations at Morehead State University and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which houses the world’s largest and most powerful radio telescope. So far, they’ve detected a signal from ISEE-3, and Cowing believes they stand a very good chance of communicating with it in days or even hours.

If they can take control of ISEE-3, then what? It’s possible that it could start a new mission. As of 1999, 12 of the 13 instruments were known to be still working, and almost three-quarters of the original fuel supply remained. Though its battery is dead, the solar panels must be functioning at least enough for it to transmit a signal. Maintaining such a mission, however, would take money that the team doesn’t have right now. Instead, one of the project’s greatest findings could simply be that it’s possible to bring an abandoned spacecraft back under control, and that NASA will give its blessing to these unofficial projects.

Citizen scientists of the future, for example, might want to resurrect the Spitzer space telescope, an exoplanet probe that’s facing shutdown as part of NASA budget cuts. “People said, ‘Why don’t you take control of that?’ Well, one lost spacecraft at a time,” says Cowing, noting that Spitzer is a more complex craft that would take more work to capture. “But it’s only a couple million dollars a year to run these things, so all it takes is somebody with a little philanthropic intent to either write a big check or — look, we’ve raised more than a tenth of a million dollars. We’re like 10 percent of the way there to running a far more sophisticated spacecraft. So if we can do it, others can.”

As NASA pursues an ambitious Mars mission in the face of constant budget crunch, Cowing hopes that everyday citizens will be able to build new spacecraft, not just commandeer old ones.

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