There’s an account of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project in the NY Times: Rebooting ISEE-3: Space for All – NYTimes.com

Government space missions are expensive. New private-sector space ventures always seem to involve billionaires. Yet we achieved results by raising funds a few dollars at a time — and by involving our donors directly in our work.

NASA likes to say that “space is hard,” but to make itself relevant to the people whose taxes fund it, it must get outside its comfort zone. To its credit, NASA saw the potential of our project to reach beyond the traditional audience. The interactions via social media with our supporters have borne this out. Imagine what feats of exploration might be possible if an empowered and engaged citizenry realized that exploring space is really something anyone can do.

And here’s an update on the project: ISEE-3 Status Report 18 July 2014 – Space College

During our pass at Arecibo today we managed to get some propulsion out of thruster K. We’re looking at how this was accomplished with an eye toward repeating it.

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.