Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
It’s dusk for Dawn.
The NASA spacecraft that was the first to orbit two worlds in one mission has sent its final messages back to Earth, mission managers announced November 1.
The spacecraft missed two check-ins with NASA’s Deep Space Network on October 31 and November 1, scientists say.
That silence likely means Dawn ran out of the hydrazine that fuels its thrusters, which help the probe point its solar panels toward the sun and its antenna toward Earth. Dawn is the second NASA mission to end recently — the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope ran out of gas at the end of October (SN Online: 10/30/18).Though the end of Dawn was expected, mission team members still expressed sadness.
“The fact that my car’s license plate frame proclaims, ‘My other vehicle is in the main asteroid belt,’ shows how much pride I take in Dawn,” mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. “The demands we put on Dawn were tremendous, but it met the challenge every time.”
Dawn launched…
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