ISEE-3 citizen science mission

Since my last post on the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, the team determined that it was impossible to restart the propulsion system due to the absence of the nitrogen pressurant gas needed to force fuel into the thrusters. They spacecraft therefore cannot be put into an orbit in the Earth-Moon system and will instead continue on its orbit around the sun.

The rest of the spacecraft system, including science instruments, are in good shape. So they plan to continue the project, focusing on carrying out citizen science activities with the data from the spacecraft:

From the latter posting:

While our original goal was to place ISEE-3 in a L-1 “halo” orbit, it will now do a flyby of the Moon and resume an orbit around the sun – an orbit nearly identical to Earth’s. We have begun the process of shutting down systems that are no longer needed and reconfiguring ISEE-3 to maximize science operations. We are also implementing plans that will allow us to listen to its science data no matter where it goes.

We will be beginning the “ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission” on 10 August 2014 as the spacecraft flies by the Moon. We have a functional space craft that can do science and is already returning new data. All of our original citizen science objectives remain unchanged and are ready for implementation. In fact, we’ll be announcing some new partnerships shortly that will serve to turbocharge our efforts in this regard.

This will be the first citizen science, crowd funded, crowd sourced, interplanetary space science mission. A more detailed summary of recent activities and our partnership team will be posted at http://spacecollege.org/isee3

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Here is a new update from today: ISEE-3 Science Status Report 7 August 2014 – Space College

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Update: See post here about the fly-by livecast and the Google SpacecraftForAll.com site.