PowerSwitch

A group of space enthusiasts and vintage hardware experts walk into a radio observatory. They contact a 36-year-old spacecraft to ask how it’s doing. The spacecraft responds and says it’s well. The group leaves and continues to stay in touch with the spacecraft from their laptops, working out of an old McDonald’s building at the NASA Ames Research Center.

It’s no joke—that’s the latest news coming from the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, a crowdfunded effort to repurpose NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3), launched in 1978 on a mission to study Earth’s magnetosphere. In 1983, ISEE was sent on a new mission to study comets Giacobini-Zinner and Halley, and has been spent the past three decades circling the sun in roughly the same orbit as Earth.

Later this year, ISEE is coming home. It will swing dramatically past the moon in accordance with its original trajectory, and the reboot team hopes to send it on one of several possible new missions. The team is now in regular contact with the spacecraft, which appears to be functioning remarkably well considering the time it has cruised silently through space.