The ISEE-3 Reboot Project: a dream SDR application

The ISEE-3 space probe has been drifting in space without a mission for 17 years, but recently that has all changed. Skycorp Incorporated and Ettus Research joined forces as part of the ISEE-3 Reboot Project in an attempt to bring new life to the NASA spacecraft.

In 1978 NASA launched ISEE-3 into space to complete its first mission, gathering crucial information on the interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and solar winds, and performing the first fly-by of a comet. ISEE-3 was lost to space when NASA terminated contact in 1997.

While the spacecraft has been drawing closer to the Earth’s orbit, the ISEE-3 Reboot Project has worked to assess the health of the probe and gain full control of its functions. There was a crucial barrier affecting the initial progress of the mission: the original hardware used by NASA to communicate with the spacecraft no longer exists. To re-establish contact with ISEE-3, the Ettus Research team developed a replacement MODEM using the USRP N210 and the open source GNU Radio framework.

The Reboot Project's Away Team made first contact with ISEE-3 at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico on the 29th of May. Arecibo boasts the world’s largest single dish radio telescope, which made it ideal to talk to the probe that was 15.3 million kilometers away at the time. Since then, the team has been decoding engineering telemetry to better understand the probe’s state, and has attempted to fire its thrusters in the hopes of performing a trajectory correction manoeuvre. Multiple USRPs are now currently deployed worldwide to enable two-way communication with the space probe.

Read the full blog post on ettus.com