30 year old spacecraft, ignored for almost a decade, to get a new lease on life

That's the subject line of an email that Lou Friedman forwarded to me last week. He'd received it from Robert Farquhar, who has a long and distinguished career as flight director for numerous space missions. The "IT" in his email was ISEE-3/ICE. Never heard of it? ISEE-3 was originally launched on August 12, 1978, as the International Sun-Earth Explorer to a halo orbit about one of the Earth-Moon libration points to study Earth's magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Then, in 1983, it employed several lunar gravity assist flybys to send it on a new journey, for which it was rechristened the International Cometary Explorer, through the tail of comet Giacobini-Zinner. ICE approached within 7,800 kilometers of the comet on September 11, 1985. In 1986, it turned its instruments toward Halley's comet, participating in the international observation campaign, and becoming the first spacecraft to investigate two comets.