Dawn Is Dead: NASA's Pioneering Asteroid-Belt Mission Runs Out of Fuel

Dawn Is Dead: NASA's Pioneering Asteroid-Belt Mission Runs Out of Fuel

Dawn Is Dead: NASA's Pioneering Asteroid-Belt Mission Runs Out of Fuel







		The darkness has finally arrived for Dawn.

		From NASA Dawn spacecraft - who orbited the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, during his long and successful life - ran out of fuel and died, officials of the agency announced today (November 1).

		"Today we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission: its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it provided and all the equipment that allowed the ship to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Directorate of Science Missions. Washington, DC, said in a statement.

The[[Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA Dawn Spacecraft]

		"The amazing images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are fundamental to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system," Zurbuchen added.

		The death of Dawn is the second blow of a rapid blow from one to two for space fans. NASA officials announced on Tuesday (October 30) that the agency's Kepler space telescope, which has discovered 70 percent of the 3,800 alien planets known to date, is without fuel too. Kepler will be discharged in the next week or two.     

		The $ 467 million Dawn mission was launched in September 2007 to study protoplaneta Vesta and the dwarf planet ceres, which are approximately 330 miles (530 kilometers) and 590 miles (950 km) wide, respectively. Scientists consider these two bodies as remnants of the planetary formation period of the solar system, which explains the name of the mission. ("Dawn" is not an acronym.)

		Dawn arrived in Vesta in July 2011 and then examined the object from orbit for 14 months. The work of the probe revealed many intriguing details about Vesta. For example, once the liquid water flowed through the surface of the protoplanet (probably after the buried ice was melted by meteorite impacts), Vesta has a high peak near its south pole that is almost as high as the famous Olympus Mons de Mars volcano.

		Dawn left Vesta in September 2012. The probe reached Ceres in March 2015, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet and the first to encircle two bodies beyond the Earth-Moon system. Such members of the mission team have said that such space flight feats were made possible by Dawn's super-efficient ion engines.

		"The demands we put on Dawn were tremendous, but they met the challenge every time," said mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, in the same statement.

		Dawn discovered a series of intriguing bright spots in Ceres. The team members of the mission determined that these characteristics were salts, which were probably left behind when the brackish water of the subsoil bubbled and evaporated in space. 

		The bright spots are young, suggesting that Ceres wore bags of liquid water buried in the recent past, and probably even retains some of these bags today, said team members of the mission. The dwarf planet is, therefore, an intriguing target for astrobiologists, especially when another Dawn discovery is taken into account: the probe detected organic molecules, the building blocks of life that contain carbon on the surface of Ceres. 





						


This photo of Ceres and one of its key landmarks, Ahuna Mons, was one of the last views that the NASA Dawn ship transmitted before exhausting its remaining hydrazine and completing its mission. This view, which faces south, was captured on September 1, 2018, at a height of 2,220 miles (3,570 kilometers) as the spacecraft ascended in its elliptical orbit. 

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA 


		Dawn also saw a "lonely mountain" 2.5 miles high (4 km), by far the highest surface feature of the dwarf planet. This mountain, which came to be called Ahuna Mons, is probably a cryovolcano that was formed in the last hundreds of millions of years, according to scientists of the mission.

		"In many ways, Dawn's legacy is just beginning," said mission principal investigator Carol Raymond, also of JPL, in the same statement. "Dawn's data sets will be deeply undermined by scientists who will work on how planets grow and differentiate, and when and where life might have formed in our solar system." Ceres and Vesta are also important for the study of planetary systems. distant, as they provide a look at the conditions that may exist around young stars. "

		The mission team concluded that Dawn had run out of hydrazine after the probe missed the communication checks scheduled yesterday (October 31) and today. Hydrazine is the fuel used by Dawn propellers, so the ship can no longer be oriented to study Ceres, transmit data to Earth or recharge its solar panels.

		Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, and probably much longer than that. Mission team members have said there is a greater than 99% chance that the probe will not spiral into the frigid, battered surface of Ceres for at least five more decades.

		The death of Dawn and Kepler was not a surprise. The members of the mission team have known for months that the tanks of both spacecraft were drying very.



	Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life. "Out there" will be published on November 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published in Space.com.

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