NASA researchers have officially announced the death of the comet-hunting spacecraft “Deep Impact” after a month’s effort of communication.
The comet-hunting spacecraft was launched in January 2005 and was able to fulfill its main mission within just half a year-- the exploration of the surface and interior composition of a comet and detonating material from the comet “Tempel 1” into space where the rover could then examine it.
After five years, another set of mission was fulfilled involving the comet “Harley 2,” thus making Deep Impact a kind of planetary observatory in space.
"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1. 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," Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at JPL, said in a press release.
Captured images of comet “ISON” currently on its way toward the Sun’s outer reaches this year and granting scientists a unique look into the imagery and composition of a distant comet named C/2009 P1 in 2012 were few of Deep Impact’s achievements. Among its best accomplishments was its help in the confirmation of presence of water on the Moon.
Before Deep Impact lost contact with Earth in August, probably because of a problem with computer time tagging -- an issue that could have caused the rover to lose control of its direction. The spacecraft has already traveled a total of 4.7 billion miles and gathered close to 500,000 images.
Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, and the Program Executive for the mission said, "Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned. 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."
