ISEE-3 Reboot Project: Update on thruster debugging with crowd-sourced expertise

I posted earlier that the reports that the ISEE-3 Reboot Project had given up on restarting the propulsion system were premature. Project member Dennis Wingo gives a detailed account of the crowd-sourced investigation into what is going on with the thrusters and into possible solutions to the failure to get substantial thrust from them: We Are Borg: Crowdsourced ISEE-3 Engineering and the Collective Mind of the Internet – Space College

Corrective Action

There is a pretty good possibility now that we have pressure and or fuel in the tanks but that it is not getting to the propellant lines and out the thrusters. We are going to of course turn the +28 volts on this time! We will also open both valves on one of the fuel systems, the primary and redundant. We will also heat the tanks to see if we can see a rapid increase in temperature. If we see a rapid rise, that would indicate no fuel in the tanks (testing for all eventualities). There are several things we will do to test out and try propulsion to bleed all the gas out of the lines.

What we could see would be not much activity and then toward the end of the pulses from the thrusters we could see propellant flow, temperature increase, and thrust!

Cross your fingers. We will have a pass on July 16th at Arecibo, so we will soon find out what the outcome is.