NASA has ended its nine-year-long Deep Impact mission, which sent 500,000 photos home to Earth and witnessed a spectacular comet impact and flyby on the Fourth of July.
A team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was forced to call the mission off after losing contact with the craft for over a month, a NASA press release reported.
"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," Mike A'Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland in College Park, said. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity."
Deep Impact had already retired from its main missions, such as an assignment to investigate the properties and interior of a comet. The craft was being used as a "space-borne planetary observatory" to send extraterrestrial pictures back to Earth.
"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at JPL, said. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."
The craft achieved a successful flyby of the comet Hartley 2, and had the opportunity to observe six stars and send the data and images to researchers. Deep Impact also captured "breathtaking" images of the moon, and was even able to help scientists find evidence of lunar water.
After losing contact with the highly-prized Deep Impact craft mission controllers struggled to reactivate it, but to no avail. The team is not sure exactly why the craft died, but said it could have something to do with a problem in computer time tagging. The technical difficulties could have interfered with the positioning of the craft's solar panels. This would have made it difficult for Deep Impact to harvest power and to communicate with Earth.
"Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned," Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, said. "Deep Impact has completely overturned what we thought we knew about comets and also provided a treasure trove of additional planetary science that will be the source data of research for years to come."
