One Last Hope for the ISEE-3?

Despite many claims that efforts to revive a 35-year-old spacecraft have ended in failure, the team behind the ISEE-3 Reboot Project have not given up hope entirely. Crowd sourcing has revealed an interesting idea that, with a lot of luck, just might work. 

Yesterday, Nature World News reported that the ISEE-3 Reboot Project had pretty much come to an anticlimactic end after a team of experts and students concluded that nitrogen reserves in the old and drifting spacecraft were likely depleted, making propulsion systems utterly useless. With this discovery, some professionals lost hope that the craft would ever be brought into the Earth's orbit, as the project intended.

"I'll know where it is in the sky and at what time, and I'm just going to look up and wave goodbye to my old friend," retired NASA engineer Bob Farquahar had told the Los Angeles Times.

However, co-leader of the Reboot Project team and CEO of Skycorp Incorporated, Dennis Wingo, posted on the Space College program website yesterday afternoon asking the scientific community to help confirm the validity of a potential solution to the spacecraft's dilemma.

"One of our volunteers, Karl-Max Wagner from Germany has an interesting idea. Did the Nitrogen pressurizing gas dissolve in the Hydrazine in the tanks?" he wrote. "This is something that we would like to research and for efficiencies sake and to get the job done quicker, we would like our project fans out there to help us in this research."

Wingo believes if the nitrogen is mixed into hydrazine reserves and not simply depleted, the team could possibly separate these fuels by raising the temperature of the fuel tank heaters to 35 degrees centigrade, according to the Sciencerecorder.

"We spent all day yesterday with space propulsion experts. We have identified a series of options including hydrazine tank heating and a long series of pulse attempts to (possibly) clear the lines," NASA Watch editor and co-leader Keith Cowing announced this morning. "We have most certainly not given up on this spacecraft yet."

According to the team, even if this last hope fails, the craft will still be within range of the Earth long enough to be reprogrammed to start one last observation mission as it sweeps around the Sun.

"It is doing science and will continue to do so for years to come," Cowing said.