A NASA spacecraft launched during the presidency of Jimmy Carter fired its thrusters on Tuesday to change course for the first time since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The first part of the maneuver succeeded, a milestone in an effort to resurrect a zombie spacecraft that NASA abandoned 17 years ago.
But then - perhaps to be expected during work on a jalopy - problems cropped up, and the thrusters failed to fire properly. Another attempt to complete the course correction will be made Wednesday.
'I feel like it is taunting us sometimes,' Keith Cowing, one of the leaders of the effort, said of the 36-year-old spacecraft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, or ISEE-3.
It is not NASA commanding the spacecraft now, but a group of civilians working in a former McDonald's in California taking advantage of technological goodies of the 21st century, including Skype, Twitter, laptop computers and crowdsourcing.
ISEE-3 is still about three million miles away, but is closing in quickly on Earth's neighborhood. It will pass close to the moon next month, and if the team can complete the course correction, the pull of the moon's gravity will sling ISEE-3 into orbit around Earth, where it will await commands for a new mission.
Launched in 1978, the craft made some of the first measurements of the solar wind - the stream of particles ejected from the sun - before it reached Earth.
A few years later, ISEE-3 was redirected to fly through the tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner. Then, in 1986, it was put on a course toward home. NASA, however, retired the spacecraft in 1997 and soon after dismantled the transmitters that could talk to it. As ISEE-3 approached, the agency decided it would be too expensive to build new transmitters to get back in touch.
Mr. Cowing, the editor in chief of the website NASA Watch, and Dennis Wingo, an engineer and entrepreneur, jumped in to fill the void. A crowdfunding campaign raised nearly $160,000. In May, they re-established communications with the spacecraft. NASA agreed to help, offering time on its Deep Space Network of radio telescopes to fine-tune measurements of the spacecraft's trajectory.
Many of the scientific instruments still appeared to be working. The magnetometer observed the rumblings of a recent solar outburst.
A week ago, the thrusters fired 11 pulses to speed up the spin of the spacecraft slightly.
That set the stage for Tuesday's maneuver, which was to fire more than 400 pulses to nudge the spacecraft onto a path that would take it close to the moon without crashing into it.
Mission control is at Mr. Wingo's company, Skycorp, which has its offices in the old McDonald's on a former Navy outpost near San Jose, Calif. There, the volunteers work on laptops that send commands to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
At 1:46 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, Mr. Cowing posted on the ISEE-3 Reboot Project's Twitter account: 'Command initiate SENT!!!'
The first series of 63 pulses appeared to go off without a hitch. But something did not work correctly during the second round of pulses, and the spacecraft failed to accelerate.
One of the valves may not have been in the right position, preventing the fuel from firing at full speed. 'In other words #ISEE3 thrusters 'burped,' ' the next Twitter post explained.
The team made a couple of more attempts before it ran out of its allotted time at Arecibo. Just as they encountered and surmounted earlier glitches, the engineers will try to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
'It's just a learning process with this thing,' Mr. Cowing said. 'It's probably going to take a day or two.'
Entities 0 Name: NASA Count: 5 1 Name: Earth Count: 3 2 Name: moon Count: 2 3 Name: Arecibo Count: 2 4 Name: Skycorp Count: 1 5 Name: Wingo Count: 1 6 Name: Calif. Count: 1 7 Name: Jimmy Carter Count: 1 8 Name: NASA Watch Count: 1 9 Name: San Jose Count: 1 10 Name: Keith Cowing Count: 1 11 Name: Comet Giacobini-Zinner Count: 1 12 Name: Cowing Count: 1 13 Name: Dennis Wingo Count: 1 14 Name: Puerto Rico Count: 1 15 Name: Navy Count: 1 16 Name: California Count: 1 17 Name: Ronald Reagan Count: 1 18 Name: Skype Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1pWtkao Title: Zombie spacecraft fires thrusters for first time in 20 years Description: Virginia-based amateur group successfully fired thrusters on 'dead' probe The spacecraft will now be moved to fly past the moon on 10 August In May the crowd-funded ISEE-3 Reboot Project 'talked' with the spacecraft But it has now also proved the thrusters work so it can be used for science
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