30 years later and documents and magnetic tapes have predictably disappeared.

The software and hardware to program, command and transmit to ISEE-3 are long gone

An independent team of engineers

Original mission: International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)

to investigate solar-terrestrial relationships at the outermost boundaries of the Earth's magnetosphere

to examine in detail the structure of the solar wind near the Earth and the shock wave that forms the interface between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere

NASA’s rover Curiosity said ‘Goodbye Kimberley’ having fulfilled her objectives of drilling into a cold red sandstone slab

sampling the

grey colored interior and pelting the fresh bore hole with a pinpoint series of parting laser blasts

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) instrument on its robotic arm to illuminate and record this nighttime view of the sandstone rock target "Windjana."

The rover had previously drilled a hole to collect sample material from the interior of the rock and then zapped a series of target points inside the hole with the laser of the rover's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument

The hole is 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter.

This summer, you will get that chance to send a message to other worlds.

leaders of an initiative called New Horizons Message Initiative, announced

at the Smithsonian Future Is Here Festival in Washington, D.C., that NASA has agreed to upload a digital crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons spacecraft

Technical Progress The Learning Curve

reliminary evaluation of the spacecraft and its systems so as to better understand it.

Most of the best information that we have been able to find has been from the people who worked on the project in the 1980's when the spacecraft was fully operational

The IEEE-3 spacecraft was launched on 12 August 1978

Originally the mission was cooperative effort between NASA and ESRO/ESA to study the interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind.

On 10 June 1982 IEEE-3 became the International Cometary Explorer with the primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere

“Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations confirm that the spot is now just under  10,250 miles (16,500 km) across, the smallest diameter we’ve ever measured,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Cente

Using historic sketches and photos from the late 1800s, astronomers determined the spot’s diameter then at 25,475 miles (41,000 km) across

Amateur observations starting in 2012 revealed a noticeable increase in the spot’s shrinkage rate

Leeuwenhoek's animalcules

In 1676, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek applied his hobby of making microscopes from his own handmade lenses to observe some water running off a roof during a heavy rainstorm. He finds that it contains, in his words, “very little animalcules.” The life he has found in the runoff water is not present in pure rainwater. This was a fundamental discovery, for it showed that the bacteria and one-celled animals did not fall from the sky. When a ball of molten glass is inflated like a balloon, a small droplet of the hot fluid collects at the very bottom the bubble. Leeuwenhoek used these droplets as microscope lenses to view the animalcules. Despite their crude nature, those early lenses enabled Leeuwenhoek to describe an amazing world of microscopic life