  The $^3$He isotope is important to many fields of astrophysics, including
stellar evolution, chemical evolution, and cosmology. The isotope is produced
in stars which evolve through the planetary nebula phase. Planetary nebulae are
the final evolutionary phase of low- and intermediate-mass stars, where the
extensive mass lost by the star on the asymptotic giant branch is ionised by
the emerging white dwarf. This ejecta quickly disperses and merges with the
surrounding ISM. The abundance of $^3$He can only be derived from the hyperfine
transition of the ionised $^3$He, which is represented as $^3$He$^+$, these
transition can be observed in the radio at the rest frequency of 8.665 GHz.
$^3$He abundances in PNe can help test models of the chemical evolution of the
Galaxy. Many hours have been put into trying to detect this line, using
telescopes like Effelsberg a 100m dish from the Max Planck Institute for Radio
Astronomy, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) 140-foot telescope,
the NRAO Very Large Array, the Arecibo antenna, the Green Bank Telescope, and
only just recently, the Deep Space Station 63 antenna from the Madrid Deep
Space Communications Complex.
