During
my first ever visit to US, way back in 1984, I used to be quite
amazed to see lots of stuff like sofas, chairs, televisions, which
appeared to be in good condition to me-left on the curbside-in
spaces adjoining the foot paths. Coming from India, where I was
tutored all along from my childhood not to throw away anything if it
can be used, it was a real culture shock. In India, it is not
customary to throw away any stuff if it can be repaired. Even when a
replacement piece is bought, usually the old one would be sold off.
There is a huge market for such stuff in India and people from small
towns can get working gadgets and furniture at a ridiculously low
cost because of this system.
I had
asked my fiend in US about this stuff, found discarded on curb sides
of the roads and what happened to it. He was quite philosophical
about it. He said no one wants old stuff in US. Every month,
companies bring out new designs and advertise widely on television
and news papers. People go for the new designs and not knowing what
to do with their existing stuff, simply discard it on the curb side.
It usually ends in junkyards from where it may end in landfill. In
fact, the entire American economy or consumerism works like this.
People do not buy things because they need something. They mostly buy
it because they are made to believe by clever advertising that they
need it.
It is
one thing to discard a sofa or a television because it has become
old, but American space agency NASA has even gone to the extent of
discarding a spacecraft because it had simply become old. Only
difference is that instead of curb side it was left into space.
NASA
had launched it's “ International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3)
satellite on August 12, 1978, into a heliocentric orbit to study the
interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind.
The spacecraft allowed scientists to observe for the first time the
high-speed stream of electrons and protons known as the solar wind
before it reached Earth. NASA renamed it as International Cometary
Explorer (ICE) on June 10, 1982, after it had completed its original
mission. It was now used to study the interaction between the solar
wind and a cometary atmosphere. On May 5, 1997, NASA simply ended the
ICE mission. The old earth station transmitters that could talk with
ISEE-3 were switched off and thrown away. Surprisingly the
spacecraft ISEE-3 was never turned off and a carrier signal was left
operating. Since that day ISEE-3 spacecraft has been looping around
the sun on a 355-day orbit. The transmitters on board of spacecraft
are still broadcasting, waiting for its next command.
After
having spent 36 years in space and 17 years after it was discarded, a
motley group of engineers, who call them as 'Skycorp,' want to revive
the spacecraft and see whether it can be put to use. Fans of the old
spacecraft still exist, who argue hat it could be used to train
future scientists and engineers. Skycorp, has its office in the
building that once housed a McDonald's fast food joint, serving US
Navy's Moffett air station, north-west of San Jose, California. After
closure, NASA had converted the base into a research campus for
small IT firms, academia and non-profit groups. Talking about his
company, Mr Dennis Wingo, an engineer and entrepreneur says that they
call themselves as techno-archaeologists. Mr. Wingo has a track
record of extracting miracles from space antiques that NASA has
given up on. If the project was to be undertaken, Spacecorp needed
funds. Nearly US$160,000 were collected on crowdfunding website
RocketHub, to help pay the costs.
Mr.
Wingo's first job was to handshake and talk with the spacecraft. By
no means, it was a simple task as no one knew how to command it and
no one had the full operating manual anymore. Only some contradictory
fragments were available. Mr. Wingo's team succeeded in building a
new transmitter that could talk to the spacecraft and went all the
way to Puerto Rico to install it on Arecibo Observatory radio
telescope.
At the
end of last month (May 2014), Mr Wingo's team finally succeeded in
talking to the spacecraft. He says that after 36 years in space, the
craft, the International Sun- Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), appears to
be in good working order and his team should be ready to fire the
engines of the spacecraft to move it to the desired location, which
could be an Earth orbit, within weeks.
I feel
that Mr. Wingo's team has achieved something that could be considered
as almost impossible. It is not only the technical expertise but also
the commercial part of it, which involved generating funds for the
project. Like the sleeping beauty from the classic fairy tale for
children, he has actually managed to awaken a real sleeping beauty in
space.
17th
June 2014
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