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“As we speak the team is in Arecibo; we posted photos today,” Keith Cowing told me over the phone. Cowing is an editor at NASAWatch.com, SpaceRef.com, Astrobiology.com, and was also immensely jealous of the team that was down in Puerto Rico. But someone had to be in the US posting the results to Space College and answering my questions, the first of which was: Where to now?“Sending it a tone, and if the spacecraft responds with that tone, then we know at that basic level that the spacecraft can send and receive information,” Cowing said. “If we can't get that, it's game over. But after that we'll repeat that a number of times and get more complex so we make sure we have that worked out.”Even though the ISEE-3's transmitter has stayed on, and was detected as recently as 2008 by NASA's DSN, that's all that we really know. So the first step is getting the vitals back from the spacecraft—where it is, how fast it's going, and how fast it's spinning—some of which is an opportunity to keep their army of interested investors invested and interested.We've detected #ISEE-3 @ Arecibo http://t.co/s2BEc4VcXN Help us make ISEE-3 do science again! http://t.co/TAeKgU6BL1 pic.twitter.com/8CDQDDWkIm
— ISEE3 Reboot Project (@ISEE3Reboot) May 20, 2014
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Then a software team has to figure out how to use new computers to talk to a spacecraft that Cowing told me didn't really have a computer. “It has a processor, which is hardwired to do certain things,” he said. “It doesn't remember anything. You just tell to do a task and that's it. Your toaster is smarter than this thing.”Based on NASA documentation of how they spoke to the spacecraft back when they launched it in 1978, software engineers are writing a sort of emulator. “The user interface will be similar to the VW Beetle you can buy today. It might look like the '60s but under the hood it runs a bit differently, but it does the same thing,” Cowing explained.The immense outpouring of generosity has taken some of the monetary pressures off the team, and NASA signed the Space Act Agreement papers, taking the legal pressure off . The only pressure left is pressing time. The laws of physics dictate that the sooner they fire the engines, the less fuel it will take to steer the ISEE-3 into a position where, after coming around the moon in August, it can be steered back into position to monitor space weather, as it was originally designed to do."Your toaster is smarter than this thing."
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