ISEE-3 Reboot Project Seeks Your Help To Solve a Technical Problem

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http://spacecollege.org/isee3/isee-3-reboot-project-seeks-your-help-to-solve-a-technical-problem.html

ISEE-3 Reboot Project Seeks Your Help To Solve a Technical Problem
By Keith Cowing on July 10, 2014 1:12 PM

We have a crowdsourced research project for our ISEE-3 Reboot fans. One of our volunteers, Karl-Max Wagner from Germany has an interesting idea. Did the Nitrogen pressurizing gas dissolve in the Hydrazine in the tanks?

This is something that we would like to research and for efficiencies sake and to get the job done quicker, we would like our project fans out there to help us in this research. I am reading an old USAF document on this now and it may be nothing, but it also may be something. We need to research the following:

- What is the solubility of Nitrogen in Hydrazine?
- What is the temperature dependence?
- Most important, what is the time required to dissolve 1 kg of Nitrogen in 15 kg of Hydrazine? This is an approximation for both tank systems of course.

This is important. Don't just throw stuff on the wall, help us research this.

Thanks!

Dennis Wingo

Via http://nasawatch.com/archives/2014/07/isee-3-reboot-p-10.html

[bananas]

1. Fresh Hope for an Abandoned NASA Spacecraft

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/robotic-exploration/fresh-hope-for-recapturing-an-abandoned-nasa-spacecraft

Fresh Hope for an Abandoned NASA Spacecraft
By Rachel Courtland
Posted 10 Jul 2014 | 20:12 GMT

News of ISEE-3’s demise may be a bit premature. A months-long bid to bring the 35-year-old International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 back into the vicinity of Earth seemed to have met its end this week, when the citizen group attempting to “reboot” the mission failed to get the thrusters to produce much more than a burp.

Tests done on Wednesday during a communications session with the Arecibo telescope seemed to suggest that the culprit was a lack of “pressurant." The spacecraft appears to have run out of the nitrogen gas it used to force hydrazine fuel from the tanks and into the thrusters.

But the reboot team, led by editor Keith Cowing and entrepreneur Dennis Wingo, CEO of California-based Skycorp Incorporated, isn’t quite ready to give up. One of the project volunteers has suggested that perhaps the nitrogen isn’t actually gone. It may in fact still be there, but dissolved in with the hydrazine.

If that’s the case, Wingo says, ISEE-3 could potentially repressurize the propellant by powering up the tank heaters, raising the temperature up perhaps 10 degrees from the roughly 25 °C where it stands now. "If [the idea] has any merit, then we could turn the heaters on and drive at least some of the nitrogen out of solution. That would give us more pressure that just heating the tanks themselves," Wingo says. "It’s not desperation," he adds. "There is some good physics behind this."

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[PeoViejo]

2. link

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/j100848a042