"No other spacecraft has been what you might call asleep for such a long period of time," says Edward Smith, one of the scientists who worked on the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It really, to me, is a fascinating thing that we can even dream of reassembling the puzzle here and put it back the way, sort of, it was - before Bob stole the spacecraft."īut waking up an old spacecraft, as though it were Rip Van Winkle, is not easy. "It's not often that something that you've sent off supposedly into oblivion sort of comes back to you," says Baker, who worked with data from ISEE-3 when he was younger. But he believes ISEE-3 could provide additional measurements that would be valuable. These days, other satellites monitor space between the Earth and the sun, says Baker. It would actually be a useful scientific tool," says Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. There's a short window in the next few months, before August, when ISEE-3 could be commanded to slow down and follow a flight path that would return it to the spot where it was stationed before it went off chasing comets. Some time before the satellite's 1978 launch, Robert Farquhar's daughter Patricia, and wife, Bonnie, joined him in a family photo with ISEE-3. His genius is inventing esoteric flight plans that take advantage of gravitational boosts from the moon and close flybys of Earth to send space probes zipping around the solar system in surprising ways. He's been called the master of getting to places. "Oh, that's about 31 years."įarquhar is now 81 years old. How many years is that?" says Farquhar, quickly calculating. "OK, so we took it away in 1983 and you get it back in 2014. "We didn't steal it we just borrowed it for a while! That's what I tried to tell them."Īfter all, he notes, the spacecraft was set on a course that would eventually bring it back.
"They thought that - it was in the newspapers, even - that we stole their spacecraft," says Farquhar. President Reagan even sent him a congratulatory letter.īut some of the scientists who'd been using ISEE-3 to study things like solar wind were not amused by the comet caper.
"We beat all the other countries of the world," recalls Farquhar.