While NASA may be out of money and all but abandoning most projects for the time being, there are still plenty of dedicated scientists and space enthusiasts willing to give up their own time and money to revive a nearly-forgotten old spacecraft. NASA launched the ISEE-3 satellite in 1978 to track solar winds, then some years later more or less abandoned in space by NASA. Believing that ISEE-3 could still provide invaluable information about what’s happening in Earth’s orbit, the group launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the satellite back up and running.

Scientists, engineers, and programmers are all lending their expertise to the project. Although NASA has made it clear that they don’t have the time or financial resources to back the project, they have also made it known that they see the satellite’s resurrection as a potentially important source of information. To achieve their goal, the satellite enthusiasts started a crowdfunding campaign to get the ISEE-3 satellite back up and running once again.

Although the project is quite ambitious and complicated, the team behind the ISEE-3 Reboot Project believe that they can re-establish communication with the satellite by July, 2014. The date is important because the satellite is due to make a very, very close flyby past the moon around that timeframe. It is expected to fly a mere 50 km from the moon but actually has a chance of colliding with it if the ISEE-3 isn’t re-activated and redirected by then.

As such, the team has to work very quickly to establish contact with the satellite and reprogram its trajectory. If all goes well, the ISEE-3 will pick up where it left off, gathering vital information about solar winds. If the project fails, the scientists may have to wait another three or four decades before the satellite again enters the area in which it can be reached, reactivated, and re-routed. Although the timeframe is tight, the team raised well more than their goal of $125,000 to make the project happen. If they are successful, this former piece of space junk will once again begin contributing important information to science.

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Space debris has been a growing problem for decades as every space mission leaves at least a few pieces of trash behind. As a result of this junk being left in orbit, there is now an increasingly alarming amount of potentially dangerous stuff in the Earth’s orbit. The Swiss Space Center plans to take out the trash with a helpful satellite called CleanSpace One.

Space junk is such a serious concern because an impact with even a teeny-tiny piece of detritus could spell disaster for passing spacecraft or satellites. This, in turn, would make even more space junk that would just exacerbate the problem.

However, CleanSpace One has a challenging job ahead of it. When it gets a lock on a piece of space debris, it has to match its orbit to that of the junk. Not surprisingly, this isn’t super-easy to do. The “janitor” satellite then has to grab and lock onto the junk and drag it down into the Earth’s atmosphere, where both the junk and the satellite will burn up upon re-entry.

The Swiss Space Center has plans that stretch far beyond their first clean-up satellite. They want to become the leaders in the field of space cleaning. The satellites won’t come cheap, but they could eventually save untold millions of dollars by keeping potentially devastating junk out of future spacecrafts’ way. The predicted launch date for the program is somewhere around 2017-2018.

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