The International Cometary Explorer (ICE), also known as the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), was launched August 12, 1978. It became the first spacecraft to visit a comet, when it encountered Comet Giacobini-Zinner in September 1985.
It made a flyby of Halley's Comet in March 1986, but the closest it got to the comet's nucleus was 28M kilometers. By comparison, Earth's minimum distance was 20.8M kilometers.
Contact with the probe was lost September 16, 2014.
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