 May 24, 2014 - 9:28am |  (some ambient background music) There is a strange little crowdfunding campaign I know you guys would be interested in. (This is not about spamming people for the program, but to show you guys a neat thing that is going on.) The end goal of this campaign is to rescue a 30+ year old satellite/space probe -- the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (launched in 1978; retired in 1997) -- from destruction as it passes through our atmosphere. In this years of opperation, it has been around, and yet, it still has some juice left in it! NASA gave up on it, but now anyone can reclaim it. The money is needed to buy the equipment needed to communicate with it (mind you, this would require systems that can speak the same computer language as the space probe). This is a big thing, as for the first time, civilians would have control of a NASA-built satellite. Here is a video talking about it. |
 May 25, 2014 - 5:35am | Wow. Pretty cool. I hope they succeed. You'd think that some universities with deep pockets would get on board- how cool would it be for your college to have ownership in a space probe that grad students and faculty could be working on its data that it collected? It sounds like they might also be planning a refuel after it "captured" and redirected to a Lagrange point. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
