Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Keith Cowing and the ISEE-3 Rebooters

Episode Date: July 22, 2014

They have generated excitement, enthusiasm and support throughout the world. The ISEE-3 Reboot Project has succeeded in gaining control over the 36-year old spacecraft, but will they be able to move it? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Keith Cowing and the IC3 Rebooters, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Who'd have thought a ragagtag gang of space geek engineers could take control of a spacecraft that had been out there for 36 long, cold years? Keith Cowan will tell us how they did it. Bill Nye will take us from the Pacific Ocean to the edge of the solar system in his segment, and we'll learn why there were pieces of a space station on stage with Miss Universe

when Bruce Betts brings us What's Up. After three weeks away, we have been rejoined by the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist. Here's Emily Lakdawalla. Welcome back, Emily. Thanks very much. It's good to be back. The solar system, as you well know, did not stand still while you were away, and there are lots of stories waiting for us to talk about. But the one that I hope that you can address is the news that's coming now from Rosetta. Yeah, it's always thrilling to approach a new world for the first time.

And small bodies in the solar system never disappoint us with their weirdness. So it was very exciting to see these new pictures of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko from Rosetta that show that this looks like two bodies stuck together. It's like got an Itokawa-shaped thing stuck to a more blobby-shaped thing. It's a very funky looking object. And I'm sure it's going to look even funkier as we get closer with Rosetta. Is this going to present any problems for the spacecraft?

Well, it's not going to present any problems for the orbiter, I don't think, but it's going to be a real challenge for the lander team to try to figure out how do you land on something whose gravity field is shaped like a rubber duck? I don't know. It does kind of resemble that. And it's obviously tumbling as well. Well, actually, I'm not so sure that it's tumbling. It's definitely rotating. It's not clear what the second axis of its rotation is, if there is any. Small bodies do tend to rotate in ways other than simple spinning, but I think the jury's still out on exactly how this one is rotating. I see. There is another body out there that may not be visited for a very, very long time,

but it has your name on it, literally. Literally. It's an object formerly named 274860, and now it still has that number, but it's got my name on it, Emily Lakdawalla. A couple of amateur astronomers from Europe actually selected this discovery of theirs to name after me, and I couldn't be more honored. I was even more excited to find out that one of the folks who works in ESA's public information office wrote the citation that explained who it was named for. So I'm just thrilled. And you're in very good company.

Some of your colleagues are also being honored this way. That's right. It's traditional, of course, to name asteroids after people you honor. And there's an awful lot of great planetary scientists on the list who got named with asteroids at the same time I did. People like Paul Schenck and Bill McKinnon and Ann Verbischer. It's very cool. There's a very good piece that Emily has posted about this, about getting an asteroid named, and a lot of other information that we can learn about these tiny objects in space delivered by a couple of other researchers.

It's an interesting piece that she posted on July 16. Her piece about Rosetta, just one update anyway, was the day before, the 15th, and I'm sure there'll be more of those coming, right Emily? Absolutely. Rosetta gets closer every single day and the pictures will just get better and better. Thanks. It's good to have you back. Thank you, Matt. Up next, Bill Nye, the science guy, CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, we got a couple of things to celebrate this week. I think first we head out to the Red Planet. Actually, we're on our way to the Red Planet by way of the Pacific Ocean. We had the drop test of the supersonic decelerator.

The idea is this is an airbag around a spacecraft going into the Martian atmosphere. And you inflate this airbag and then the bluff body, the plane, the area that the spacecraft presents to the atmosphere gets very much bigger and slows the whole thing down. And this sounds sort of straightforward, like a parachute, except it's supersonic because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, there's nothing to keep the molecules in check. So they go zooming around. And so it's really a complicated thing and then a supersonic parachute bigger than anybody's ever built 30 meters across or so hundred hundred feet across deploys and slows the thing down the parachute didn't work so well but the aerodynamic decelerator did so this may lower the cost of

sending missions to Mars, allow us to send bigger gizmos to Mars, where we'll make discoveries and look for signs of water and life. That would, as I so often point out, change the world. Now, in the meantime, out there at the edge of the solar system, we've gotten confirmation of something that is pretty exciting. Yes, the Voyager spacecraft has left the solar system farther than Elvis ever went. So far as we know. Yeah, well, that's exactly well said. It's way out there, and it is no longer under the influence of the sun and its magnetic field and the solar wind particles that stream off.

So it's really in interstellar space at last. And in human terms, it took quite a while. It was launched in 1977, right? I believe so. It's easy. They both begin with V. Viking was 76. Voyager, 77.

I like that. Anyway, so it takes almost 40 years. 40 years to get out of the solar system because there is so much space in space. It's an extraordinary time. I mean, it's the stuff of science fiction, except as we so often point out, it's real. It's really an amazing time. Thank you for bringing both of these to our attention this week. One that can give us hope of putting people on Mars and the other that says we're an interstellar species.

It's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Carry on, Matt. We're going tostellar species. It's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. Carry on, Matt. We're going to change the world. Thank you, Bill. He's Bill Nye, the science guy, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Back in a moment to talk about another tremendous human endeavor done by some guys on a shoestring budget.

Most of the features we bring you come to us from a space agency or some other big, prestigious institution. Here's a mission that has adopted an old McDonald's restaurant as its mission control center, that has largely raised its shoestring budget through crowdfunding and that has succeeded in almost every way except for getting the spacecraft at its focus to kick its rockets into gear. Almost exactly 36 years ago, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3, or IC3, was launched into orbit around the sun by NASA. It would later be repurposed and renamed as the International Cometary Explorer, or ICE. Then it was more or less abandoned in 1997, still functioning, but no longer seen as useful. That's how things stayed until Keith Cowan and Dennis Wingo decided to try something outrageous. On May 29th of this year, the IC3 Reboot Project team succeeded.

They re-established contact with the antique probe and started working on getting its thrusters and science instruments working. Keith Cowling is also the editor of such online space resources as Space Ref and NASA Watch. That's the website that regularly gets under the skin of the space agency's leadership and others. Keith, welcome to Planetary Radio. My first question, as we speak, it is Wednesday, July 16th. Give us a status report. What happened today? Well, today we were interplanetary plumbers. We've had a lot of luck with the spacecraft thus far, given that it's been on for 36 years and we had to recreate everything from scratch and find people who retired and get their secrets out of them. But one of the things that we've had some problems with is propulsion. We were able to do a spin up maneuver on the 2nd of July and it went well.

So we thought, hey, we got this elect and we tried to do some trajectory correction maneuvers a few days later, and it didn't go well. And subsequent to that, we went through a whole variety of checklists and fault trees trying to figure out what was going on, and it ranged from not having fuel, which we thought was a little odd that it would just decide today to suddenly not have fuel after having done it before, to the notion that maybe the nitrogen, which is the pressureant, was somehow dissolved in the hydrazine, that maybe the lines are frozen. I mean, everything under the sun.

And given that we're a crowdfunded, crowdsourced sort of crowd, we just said help on Twitter. And within a few hours, we had real live hydrazine monopropellant propulsion experts giving us all this free help. So we took that into account, worked through a fault-free analysis, and came up with a process that we use today, which was sort of a methodical use of different pairings of thrusters and valves, the notion being that if you did one thing and it worked and you knew something, if it didn't do something, you knew something else. worked and you knew something. If it didn't do something, you knew something else. And we also heated the tanks and the fuel lines because we had sort of arrived at the conclusion that we did have fuel. It might have been a little cool. There might be some clogging, but that also because the catalytic bed heaters have been left on since 1978, that some strange gases might just

have built up in the pipes over time, which would be preventing the normal decomposition of hydrazine. So we worked that all together. We heated things up. We opened some valves. We tried to vent whatever gas might be in there. And then we told the spacecraft to fire 500 times, hoping that eventually at some point we would clear things out and we'd start to get some thrust.

Well, the first combination didn't work. The second didn't. The third, we got some thrust, and the fine sun sensor says the spacecraft had shifted a bit. And then we went back to no joy after that. So at the end of today's session, we know we have fuel because the fuel tanks only went up a slight amount in temperature, which is what you'd expect if there was fuel in there.

If they were empty, they would have gotten much hotter, much faster. And second of all, we found one path to get something in the fuel line that gave us a bit of propulsion. So we've got to go back and sort of recreate that event, but to keep it going. And at this point, we've got another week or so before the propellant requirements start to get very steep. So we have a little room, but not much. This is an awesome story. We have been inspired, my colleagues and I at the Planetary Society, as we follow this. And you may know that my colleague Jason Davis is one who has been writing about it at planetary.org. It is exciting in so many ways. For one thing, it obviously the story isn't over yet. But also you went past it. I mean, it's not just crowdfunded, it's crowdsourced. And I think this is one of the reasons, because of the kind of people that you've been getting help from online, that you don't that I'm okay with it, except a lot of people use it because they really mean amateur.

And we're not. I've designed spacecraft for more than a decade at NASA. Our entire team has done this and is still doing it. And our navigator is Mike Lux, and he was the navigator on LADEE. And, you know, we've got Bob Farquhar helping us, and he's designed everything. You know, we're a bunch of professionals. It's just that we found a way to do this very cheap and get a lot of people to donate their time. So just recently a documentary was made about our Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which is the twin sister of the ISC E3 reboot project.

And in that project, the film crew actually went to Dennis Wingo's house and filmed him, you know, having his coffee in the morning and feeding his cat. And the notion that came through on that was exactly as we had intended for both projects, and that is it should be quite normal that somebody wake up, feed the cat, have some coffee, and do something in outer space. At least we think so. I couldn't agree more. One of the most exciting things about this is you've gotten these folks who were with the original mission, who helped build this spacecraft. They've been sending you pictures and advice.

Yeah, and it was kind of interesting. Of course, you could not do this without Bob Farquhar, because A, he wouldn't let you, and B, you need him. And Bob's one of the geniuses behind this spacecraft and its many adventures, its multiple lifetimes. And, you know, Bob was all too ready to help us. And, you know, he got his gang of retired space guys, he calls them the space cowboys. And, you know, I went from one house to another looking through storage units and basements and dumpster diving for old documents. And quite frankly, it would have been harder to keep these guys from not helping us as opposed to getting them to help us. And now they're telling all their friends. So we've got all these retired NASA folks and whatnot just calling up and saying,

hey, guess what I have in my garage, or guess what I know. So it's great. That's Keith Cowling, co-leader with Dennis Wingo of the IC3 Reboot Project. More in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space.

We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You,

your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The IC3 Reboot Project has succeeded in so many ways. Keith Cowing co-leads the grassroots effort that has attracted media attention and public participation around the world. As I record this, nearly a week has passed since the only partially successful second attempt to fire the 36-year-old spacecraft's thrusters. attempt to fire the 36-year-old spacecraft's thrusters. Keith was telling us before the break about the scrounging he and others did to piece together the information they needed to get this far. In all that dumpster diving, I don't think you found the original communications equipment, and it's another good story to talk about how you got around the fact that all that hardware probably got junked decades ago.

Well, it's kind of interesting because with the Lunar Orbiter project, we actually have the original tape drives and everything, but we had to work on manuals and procedures and so forth. So Dennis and I sort of been through this before. But in this case, the hardware was thrown out for a logical reason that the Deep Space Network has upgraded over time and they use far more sophisticated means to do things now so it's not surprising that this stuff wouldn't be there anymore but the fact is it wasn't nobody had saved it and you know you couldn't find it on ebay

and of course that was one of the problems that was cited in trying to come up with a cost to how to do this and that you oh you have to recreate the hardware and if you do it the nasa way that's millions of dollars and so forth well you know we didn't have to recreate the hardware. And if you do it the NASA way, that's millions of dollars and so forth. Well, you know, we didn't have millions of dollars, but we have people who knew what software-defined radio is, which is, in essence, a device that's part computer, part radio, and you just use software to tell it how to do things. And you can tell it to emulate or pretend it's the hardware that IC3 used back in the day.

We managed to hook up with Edis Research, and they just became, like, you know, the most up with Edis Research, and they just became like, you know, the most enthusiastic partners you could have. And they helped us do all this. And we turned the folks at Aerocebo onto it, and they hadn't really done a lot of it. So now they're big software-defined radio fans. And we were able to sort of, you know, again, recreate what had been lost. That's fine, but how do you talk to the spacecraft? So we had to go find the command language and the protocol. And then we had to make sure that we were telling it to do things in the way that it understood.

And then lastly, when you do all that, there's still a few things that still didn't quite work. One was the way that the Deep Space Network talks to the spacecraft, and we had it all set up to talk to IC3 to do some ranging to find out where it was, and it just wasn't working. And we went through one whole session, and these guys are psyched to do it, and they were scratching their heads. And we finally came up with a solution, is that we recorded the audio tones

that we would have sent to the spacecraft back in the day, just like your old cranky dial-up modem. And then we had the Deep Space Network play that recording as it transmitted to the spacecraft, and the spacecraft said, oh, hello. I love it. Yeah, so this is all, and you have to kind of just know that this is something that can be done.

The guys at Arecibo were great. The folks at NASA and elsewhere, we have some really great helpers in this project. The AMSAT-DL folks that operate out of Bachum Observatory in Germany. That's the amateur radio guys who work with satellites. Again, I don't like that word amateur. These guys are pros.

Yeah. And as a matter of fact, today they were a couple minutes late starting with us because they were helping listen to the stereo mission. It is a global phenomenon that you have created. In fact, just before we started recording, I think you said I was the 57th media guy taking up your time just today. Yeah, something like that, between emails and phone calls. Maybe not 57, but it's double.

We just stumbled on a good story. I think a lot of this comes from the crowd dash, whatever word you put after that. I learned this when I did the crowdfunding for the Lunar Orbiter Project. We eventually raised $100,000 to keep that going. We were just telling a story about a bunch of guys with some old junk in an abandoned McDonald's, and people just gravitated to it. William Shatner was shouting out to us on Twitter at one point. For this one here, I mean, we just sort of just decided to do it at almost a moment's notice.

Within five days of deciding to do this, we were crowdfunding. No matter what happens with the spacecraft, I think this has been a tremendous success. I do wonder, though, if all goes well, if you manage to get those thrusters working and you can do that trajectory correction, then what? What are the plans for the spacecraft? Ideally, we want to put it back in the L1 orbit that it was in back in 1978. And, of course, we have some other options. There's L2 and so forth. But these all derive backwards from having a propulsion system that does what we want it to do.

And so far, it's not. And so we've got a lot of plans in place for how to use the spacecraft. First of all, contrary to a lot of the descriptions, you know, people call it zombie spacecraft. Well, no, it's awake. It's sending back science. As a matter of fact, it's already sent back magnetometer data that syncs with solar events that were seen from other spacecrafts. So we're getting science and we're going to get more of it back as we turn on more of the science instruments. And some of the original PIs are already looking through the data and parsing it, ready to post it online for regular folks just to pick up and play with. Our plan was to eventually just have everybody everywhere who could listen to listen to it, post the data, and then encourage people to take our data, please, and do stuff with it.

But we will have the ability to listen to the spacecraft as long as it wants to talk to us. We have larger dishes around the world, and we'll probably get some more. We're going to create what we're calling our own ad hoc DSN. And so even if we can't fire the engines, which we are really trying to do, we have brought the spacecraft back into utility and we will actually configure it once we're done trying to use the propulsion system so that all the power goes to instruments that are sending back science data. So no matter what, we're having a spacecraft brought back from, you know, obscurity that is telling us about science. And no matter where it is in the inner solar system, we'll be able to use the data.

I guess the option is, you know, is it a near-Earth mission or an interplanetary mission? And I think either one are cool. As I said in the introduction, most of us in the space biz or buzzing around it know you better for your other life, running Space Ref and NASA Watch. You know, NASA Watch especially has not exactly made you the best of buds with NASA. What does it feel like to more or less be in partnership with them now? Well, you're accurate and you're not. I mean, I don't want to get into who my friends are, but let's just say there are some, I know people don't like me, but a lot of people give me the time of day. This isn't the first time I've done something wacky like this. I mean, my business partner

and I, Mark Boucher, we built a greenhouse up on Devon Island as part of the Mars project. They trusted me enough to have a moon rock when I went to Everest Base Camp with my friend Scott Parazynski, who took it to the summit of Everest. We did the Lunar Orbiter Project. And I guess they sort of figured out that if I'm west of the Mississippi or at high altitudes, it's nice Keith. And maybe he's distracted by lack of oxygen or good food. We've always felt that we're in a position to give back to the community that we derive our support from. And I don't think NASA would partner with us and others if they really didn't sort of see beyond a lot of things. And, you know, they don't often disagree with what I said. As a matter of fact, many times they say,

I wish I could say that. So, you know, it's a love-hate relationship, I guess. But this is like the fourth or fifth time I've done something. and I'm completely open about it. I mean, it's not like I'm not telling people I'm the editor of NASA Watch or Space Rep. I am. I think it just makes it all the more interesting if one of NASA's biggest critics can also be one of its biggest fans. I know people like to compartmentalize things at NASA, and I sort of confound those categories, but after 20 years of doing NASA Watch and things like that, I think people probably figured me out by now. Keith, I think some of your biggest fans are inside the space agency. And you certainly have lots of us on the outside who are both regular readers of

Space Ref and NASA Watch, but also are saying, go reboot team. Best of luck with these next steps as you try to do even more with IC3. Right. And then there's our next project. Tell us. Oh, well, I don't want to be surprised. All right. Do you promise to come back? I promise. Thanks so much, Keith. My pleasure.

Keith Cowing of NASA Watch and Space Ref is also, well, he and Dennis Wingo are the two guys who more or less decided, let's bring back the IC-3 spacecraft. That's what they're in the process of doing right now. We'll bring back Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Hey, good to be back. Our winner last week, you remember when we mentioned Ron Kaltenbaugh? What I forgot to mention, and I feel compelled to mention now, since we talked to Emily about

the asteroid that's been named after her, is the special greeting, the special message that Ronald gave us. He said, I think the next two Saturn moons discovered should be called Matt and Bruce. That's brilliant!

I don't know if he sent that request in into the IAU, but I'll prod him. Okay, please do. I'm sure that will make it happen. One can hope. How's the night sky? It's lovely. I'll start you out in the pre-dawn, where you have to get a clear view to the eastern horizon in the pre-dawn, but then you can check out super bright Venus. If you're catching this early enough, the 24th, the moon, right next to it, lovely, beautiful. And if you can look below Venus in the next few days to the lower left, you can still catch Mercury, although it is quite low. In the evening sky, we've still got Mars and Saturn doing their thing. In the south, in the early evening, Mars looking reddish, Saturn looking yellowish.

Over to the left of Mars, we have a few weeks before a really good meteor shower. Always something to look forward to in the sky. There is indeed. Moving on to this week in space history, it was 45 years ago, of course, that Apollo 11 returned to Earth. of course, that Apollo 11 returned to Earth. Six years later, during the same week, in 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz crew returned to Earth. And we are going to have a great story about Neil Armstrong next week.

We're going to talk to Jay Barbary, who's written a biography about his friend, Neil Armstrong. So stay tuned for that. I look forward to it. We move on to goal this i love this fact this kind of blew me away when you you think about it hubble hubble space telescope its angular resolution is 0.05 arc second. And already you're going, whoa.

But even if you're not, and if you could see as well as Hubble, and of course had a flat Earth and no atmosphere, you could be in New York and distinguish two fireflies one meter apart, only one meter apart in San Francisco. Wow. That's a good one. You are absolutely right. That's really good resolution. So I just thought I'd share the technical evaluation. Well, we're ready for the contest. We've got some fun answers.

All right. I asked you on what highly publicized international stage were parts of Skylab displayed after it reentered the atmosphere and splattered itself a few places? And how did we do, Matt? Surprisingly well. We had just about twice as many entries as normal this week. Our winner is Dan Campbell. Dan Campbell of Cumming, Georgia. I believe a first-time winner. He's going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt because he told us that that debris from Skylab was displayed at the 1979 Miss Universe pageant in Perth, Australia. It was indeed, because Skylab, in addition to splattering in the Indian Ocean, dropped some pieces in Western Australia, where Perth is. So just a few days before the contest. We thank Kev Knowles from next door to Perth over there in New Zealand.

He let us know that the Miss Universe who was crowned there in Perth was Maritza Sayalero. Far more significantly, we heard from Kurt Lewis of Missouri City, Texas. I'm very glad he gave us this bit of trivia. Rumor has it that the judges were very impressed by the piece of Skylab and awarded it highest marks in the talent competition. Unfortunately, this was not sufficient to overcome its low score in swimsuit. Better luck next year. Oh, it's already been next year. All right.

Well, sorry, Skylab. You're out of the running. Every spacecraft only gets one chance to compete. That's my understanding. That's only fair. All right. On Apollo 11, what was used to make a broken circuit breaker work in the lunar module to enable liftoff from the moon? So they looked, and it's like, whoa, hey, where did that piece of the circuit breaker go?

What did they use to fix that wee bit of a problem? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest to get your entry to us. I know that if that had been fuses, it would be a penny, but I never heard this story. So I guess we'll find out from the listeners. And we'll do that by the deadline of Tuesday, the 29th, Tuesday, July 29th, at 8am Pacific Time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about the space bar on your keyboard. Thank you. And good night. True story. I used to work at the space bar in Disneyland. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology

for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the spaced-out members of the Society. Clear skies..