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Techno-Archaeologists Used an Abandoned McDonald's to Hijack a Satellite
From an abandoned McDonald's in the backyard of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, a dozen or so volunteer scientists and engineers have taken control of a decommissioned, still running, 70s-era space satellite, currently some 20,000 kilometers away, by using discarded vintage space computers and a few sweet eBay finds.
A bit of context: The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) satellite was launched on August 12, 1978, and was originally meant to study the Earth’s magnetosphere from the L1 Lagrangian point between the Sun and the Earth, where the gravity of both bodies cancel each other out.
In the past 36 years, the spacecraft has circled the Sun 31 times, encountered and sent back data about passing comets, and was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) in 1983. But by 1997, NASA had stopped routinely checking the status of the craft, and abandoned any future use for it …. http://motherboard.vice.com
Source: http://luismmx.blogspot.com/2014/08/techno-archaeologists-used-abandoned.html
