SciByte

Since then, the 1 ton robot carefully scrutinized the resulting 2.6 inches (6.5 centimeters) deep bore hole

the mound of dark grey colored drill tailings piled around for an up close examination of the texture and composition with the MAHLI camera and spectrometers

successfully delivered pulverized and sieved samples to the pair of onboard miniaturized chemistry labs

Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin)

Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM)

for chemical and compositional analysis.

rover’s

decided that one drill campaign into Kimberley was enough.

So the rover will not be drilling into any other rock targets here

it may be a very long time before the next drilling

the guiding team of scientists and engineers wants

arrive at the foothills of Mount Sharp as soon as possible.

further analysis of the ‘Windjana’ sample along the way

there’s plenty of leftover sample material stored in the CHIMRA sample processing mechanism to allow future delivery of samples when the rover periodically pauses during driving.

Windjama lies some 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) southwest of Yellowknife Bay

still has about another 4 kilometers to go to reach the foothills of Mount Sharp sometime later this year

have also obtained several documents from NASA as part of the development of our Space Act Agreement

Since there is no computer on board the ISEE-3 spacecraft our task is actually much easier since we are going to be directly commanding various subsystems

This is an ongoing process and we have, as usual, dug some of the pertinent information out of 35 year old IEEE or AIAA papers that are publicly available

The ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft was never really designed to be an interplanetary cruiser and thus the thrusters on board are very small

estimate that if we wait until mid-June to do the course correction that it will take 17 hours of thrusting to get the course change of about 40 meters/second that we will need at that time

recovering old imagery on magnetic tape reels from the first lunar orbiter missions),

operating outside the ranks and hallways of NASA

to accomplish a landmark achievement: to turn on, command and maneuver a NASA spacecraft long ago abandoned

Amateur radio operators now have technology sufficient to acquire the signal and through the internet are also a part of the recovery effort

without the original hardware transmitter, today’s high-speed electronics are able to emulate in software the hardware from 36 years ago

investigate motions of and mechanisms operating in the plasma sheets

continue the investigation of cosmic rays and solar flare emissions in the interplanetary region near 1 AU

Second mission: International Cometary Explorer

On June 10, 1982, after completing its original mission, ISEE-3 was repurposed. It was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE)

The primary scientific objective of ICE was to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere

a series of lunar orbits over the next 15 months. Its last and closest pass over the Moon, on December 22, 1983, was a mere 119.4 km above the Moon's surface. By the beginning of 1984, ICE was in heliocentric orbit

Giacobini-Zinner encounter

on a trajectory intercepting that of Comet Giacobini-Zinner.

On 11 September 1985, the craft passed through the plasma tail of Comet Giacobini-Zinner

ICE carried no cameras. It instead carried instruments for measurements of energetic particles, waves, plasmas, and fields

Halley encounter

transited between the Sun and Comet Halley in late March 1986, when other spacecraft

were in the vicinity of Comet Halley

ICE flew through the tail

Heliospheric mission

mission was approved by NASA in 1991

consisting of investigations of coronal mass ejections in coordination with ground-based observations

End of mission

On May 5, 1997, NASA ended the ICE mission, and ordered the probe shut down, with only a carrier signal left operating

Further contact

In 1999, NASA made brief contact with ICE to verify its carrier signal. On September 18, 2008

NASA, with the help of KinetX, located ICE using the Deep Space Network after discovering that it had not been powered off after the 1999 contact

status check revealed that all but one of its 13 experiments were still functioning, and it still has enough propellant

Reboot effort

A team webpage said, "We intend to contact the ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) spacecraft, command it to fire its engine and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission...If we are successful we intend to facilitate the sharing and interpretation of all of the new data ISEE-3 sends back via crowd sourcing."

Sometime after NASA's interest in the ICE waned

A team of engineers, programmers, and scientists

realized that the spacecraft might be steered to pass close to another comet

began to study the feasibility and challenges involved

On May 15, 2014, the project reached its crowdfunding goal

which will cover the costs of writing the software to communicate with the probe, searching through the NASA archives for the information needed to control the spacecraft, and buying time on the dish antennas

The project then set a 'stretch' goal of $150,000

The project members are working on deadline: if they get the spacecraft to change its orbit by late May or early June 2014, it can use the Moon's gravity to get back into a useful halo orbit.

Earlier in 2014, officials with the Goddard Space Flight Center had said that the Deep Space Network equipment necessary to transmit signals to the spacecraft had been decommissioned in 1999, and that replacing it was not economically feasible

oject members obtained the needed hardware (power amplifier, modulator/demodulator[12]), and installed it on the 305-meter Arecibo dish antenna on May 19, 2014

Although NASA is not funding the project, it made advisors available and gave approval to try to establish contact

On May 21, 2014, NASA announced that it had signed a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with the ISEE-3 Reboot Project

"This is the first time NASA has worked such an agreement for use of a spacecraft the agency is no longer using or ever planned to use again," officials said

The mission required the spacecraft to leave the Earth/moon system and orbit around the sun instead

After encounters with comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985 and the famous Halley’s comet in 1986 and the study of CME’s from the sun in 1991, the “plug” was pulled in the spacecraft on 5 May 1997

That instrument provides information about the target's composition by analysis of the sparks of plasma generated by the energy of the laser beam striking the target

This view combines eight separate MAHLI exposures, taken at different focus settings to show the entire scene in focus

The exposures were taken after dark on the 628th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (May 13, 2014)

MAHLI includes light-emitting diodes as well as a color camera.

Using the instrument's own lighting yields an image of the hole's interior with less shadowing than would be seen in a sunlit image

The camera's inspection of the interior of the hole provides documentation about what the drill bit passed through as it penetrated the rock -- for example, to see if it cut through any mineral veins or visible layering

The content of the message will be determined by whomever wants to participate in the planet-wide project

The message itself will be transmitted sometime after New Horizons does a flyby of Pluto in 2015 and sends back the scientific data that it collects

If all goes according to plan, New Horizons will become the fifth man-made object to travel beyond the solar system—after Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2.

it's the only one of the five not to launch with a message for any alien travelers it might encounter along the way

The Pioneer spacecrafts bore plaques on their sides, and the Voyagers each carried golden records (and the means to play them).

When New Horizons' journey was being planned

other missions had been scrapped and the budget was extremely tight

didn't have the bandwidth for

the message

. "Now

It doesn't cost massive amounts because there's no hardware, just uplinking ones and zeroes

Lomberg, who worked closely with Carl Sagan on the Voyager golden record in 1977, had an epiphany last year about sending the message digitally

In September 2013, Lomberg launched a website with a petition to NASA. By February 2014, 10,000 people from over 140 countries had signed it.

Lomberg approached Stern, who advised him that NASA would need evidence of public support

This message will be very different from the one Lomberg designed with Sagan almost 40 years ago

The 21st-century version will be a global self-portrait, pieced together by many willing hands

Anyone on Earth will be able to upload potential content (images, sounds, software—the formats haven't been finalized)

Then everyone will be able to vote on what to include

"Our team is going to provide the overall architecture of the message," says Lomberg, "but we'll try to keep ourselves open to what we will send."

, a National Geographic emerging explorer

will have to figure out how to wrangle a planet's worth of opinions into the roughly 100 MB of memory New Horizons will have available on its computer.

the project will officially launch August 25, the final file may not be sent for several years

The New Horizons computer won't have any room in its memory until the data from Pluto are transmitted back to Earth, which could take more than a year

"The spacecraft is so far away," says Lomberg, "that download times are like dial-up Internet."

Pluto may not be the final mission target

hopes that the spacecraft will have a shot at a flyby of another object in the Kuiper Belt of the solar system

If that happens, the message upload will be delayed

As long as the spacecraft is healthy and the radio is working," he says, "there's no particular rush to send it

cosmic radiation may eventually corrupt the spacecraft's electronic memory

The New Horizons message won't last nearly as long as the metal missives attached to Pioneer and Voyager will

could help lay the foundation for the colonization of Mars,

its designers say

The MPX team

isn't suggesting that the 2020 Mars rover should

digging a hole with its robotic arm and planting seeds in the Red Planet's dirt.

the experiment would be entirely self-contained, eliminating the chance that Earth life could escape and perhaps get a foothold on Mars.

MPX would employ a clear "CubeSat" box

which would be affixed to the exterior of the 2020 rover

This box would hold Earth air and about 200 seeds of Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant that's commonly used in scientific research

The seeds would receive water when the rover touched down on Mars, and would then be allowed to grow for two weeks or so.

MPX would provide an organism-level test

how Earth life deals with the Red Planet's relatively high radiation levels and low gravity, which is about 40 percent as strong as that of Earth,

"It also would be the first multicellular organism to grow, live and die on another planet