ISEE-3 (ICE) Revisits Earth

  • Released Monday, April 14, 2014
  • Updated Thursday, January 8, 2015 at 2:01PM
  • ID: 4161

Top-down view of the orbit of ISEE-3(ICE) relative to the inner solar system. We see the orbit alternates with the spacecraft occasionally closer, then further from the Sun that Earth.

ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) was a mission launched in 1978 and was the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth-Sun L1 (Wikipedia: Lagrange) point.

Its primary mission complete, it was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) and its orbit was altered to measure the electrodynamic environments of comets Giacobini-Zinner and Halley (Wikipedia). It subsequently entered a solar orbit which sent it inside and outside the orbit of the Earth.

In mid-2014, its current orbit will have ICE pass close to the Earth.

An oblique view of the orbit of ISEE-3(ICE) relative to the inner planets. Close-up view of the Earth flyby in mid-2014.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Datasets used in this visualization

DE421 (A.K.A. JPL DE421)
Ephemeris | NASA/JPL

Planetary ephemerides

Dataset can be found at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides#planets

See more visualizations using this data set
JPL/Horizon Orbital Ephemerides
Ephemeris | NASA/JPL

Planetary ephemerides

Dataset can be found at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons

See more visualizations using this data set

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.

You may also like...

Loading recommendations...