Curtain Falls on ISEE-3 Reboot Project as Propulsion System Fails

7-9-2014 | Dan Leone, NASA reporter for SpaceNews

WASHINGTON -- NASA’s International Earth/Sun Explorer (ISEE)-3 will not be resuming its original mission after all, now that citizen scientists and engineers striving to rescue it discovered July 9 that the old heliophysics observatory’s propulsion system is not working.

“There was no burn and we detected no acceleration and nothing was coming out of the engines,” NASAWatch.com editor Keith Cowing, who spearheaded the ISEE-3 Reboot Project along with entrepreneur Dennis Wingo, said in a July 9 phone interview.

“We really can’t do anything,” Cowing said.

The widely read blogger spoke to SpaceNews after a failed attempt to complete the remaining engine burns that project officials thought would be required to send the spacecraft, currently in a heliocentric orbit, back toward the gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1. From that position, the 1970s-vintage spacecraft was expected to be able to resume observations of solar winds breaking against Earth’s magnetosphere.