Hacking the Remains of NASA's Past

Both of these are sort of old news, but I was reading about them again recently, and I wanted to share them in case anyone missed them. Both involve old NASA missions that have recently had new life breathed into them.

The first is a project/location dubbed "McMoon". (Wired, Wikipedia) At an abandoned McDonalds in California, a bunch of tech entrepeneurs and current and former NASA folks have been working with both old and new equipment to digitize imagery captured by some of the original moon probes back in the mid-1960's.

The second is an effort by some other tech folks to reestablish contact with an abandoned NASA satellite whose mission ended years ago. (article, Wikipedia) The team was apparently able to reestablish contact, but was unable to maneuver the probe due to what they believe to have been a loss of pressure in the propellant tanks. They lost contact with the spacecraft in September, but the fact that they were able to reestablish contact in the first place is still pretty impressive.

The attached picture dates back to 2007, when I was fortunate enough to take a helicopter tour that included portions of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. The photo in question is of the Mars Site, which is one of the newer dishes; however, one of the older dishes, probably the Pioneer Site, would have received signals from the Lunar Orbiter probes. A variety of different stations may have been involved with tracking and communication with the ISEE-3/ICE probe. Goldstone and the rest of the Deep Space Network are mentioned in articles about both projects, so I figured I'd share my snapshot from that tour.