Another zombie satellite (this time NASA's, not AMSAT's) -- but NASA doesn't want to spend the $ to talk to it.

[Mark Whittington]

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/america-forgot-how-to-talk-to-its-zombie-spaceship-20140212

If we could talk to ISEE-3, we could use its Earth approach this summer as
a jumping-off point to send it comet-hunting (it became the first
spacecraft to fly past a comet in 1985). It's equipped to measure plasmas,
energetic particles, waves, and fields.

Some want to crack the history books and figure out how to rebuild the
transmitter necessary to once again talk to our lonely spaceship. Why waste
a resource that we've already put in space? But NASA says that would prove
too expensive. "They thought it would [cost] so much that it wasn't worth
spending the staff time to get the estimate," Lakdawalla said.


This is kind of depressing.  I wonder if there's any way to convince them
to cough up the specs and let some volunteers take a crack at it?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20140212/740e87c2/attachment.html>