On September 11, 1985, the International Cometary Explorer, or ICE, made history by becoming the first spacecraft to fly by a comet. Originally launched in 1978 as the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), it was part of a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Research Organization, and the European Space Agency. The ISEE program aimed to study space weather, which refers to how the Earth's magnetic field interacts with the solar wind—a stream of charged particles from the sun. After completing its primary mission, ICE was redirected to study comets, marking the start of a new chapter in its journey. The spacecraft was equipped with 14 scientific instruments, including detectors for solar wind, cosmic rays, and X-rays. For its original mission, ISEE-3 was placed at the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitational sweet spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, where it spent three years studying the sun-Earth environment. It was the first spacecraft to orbit a Lagrange point, a significant achievement in space exploration. In 1981, after completing its primary mission, ICE was repurposed for a new mission. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center maneuvered the probe through Earth’s magnetic tail, a first in space exploration, and sent it on a course to visit Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. Renamed the International Cometary Explorer, ICE flew through the comet’s plasma tail on September 11, 1985, collecting valuable data. It later passed by Halley’s Comet in 1986, offering a distant view of the famous comet during its closest approach to Earth. Although NASA officially ended the ICE mission in 1995, it gained new attention in 2014 when a group of independent scientists tried to reactivate the probe. They raised $125,000 through crowdfunding to attempt to communicate with ICE, which had five functioning instruments and a working transmitter. While they successfully fired the probe’s thrusters in July 2014, subsequent attempts to control it failed. ICE continued on its orbit around the sun and is expected to return near Earth in 2031. Another significant event occurred on September 11, but this time in 2001. On that day, NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was the only American in space when the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place. As part of a three-person crew aboard the International Space Station, he witnessed the events from orbit. Culbertson described the experience as deeply painful, comparing the attacks to "a wound in the side of your country." His perspective offered a unique view of the tragedy from above Earth.