NASA Announces End of Dawn Spacecraft Mission

On this first day of November, NASA completed the Dawn spacecraft mission.

After missing two check-ins, one on October 31st and one yesterday, the US space agency concluded that the fuel needed for Dawn to keep her solar panels facing the sun, causing her battery to recharge, reached end. Therefore, she was declared officially dead.

The crew accompanying the spacecraft's trajectory already knew it could be unloaded at any time. But that was not enough for the news to have less impact on those who worked directly on its construction.

The fact that the sign on my car says 'My other vehicle is in the main asteroid belt' shows how proud I am of Dawn, mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman said in a press release.

Dawn was launched in 2007. In her 11-year mission, she traveled 6.9 billion kilometers and explored two of the largest objects on the asteroid belt, which is located between Mars and Jupiter. She first orbited the asteroid Vesta, then became the first and only spacecraft to orbit the dwarf planet Ceres.

The information captured about Vesta and Ceres led the researchers to conclude how different the two bodies are in their compositions, which was of paramount importance for them to better understand the dynamics of the ancient Solar System. Dawn took 95, 000 photos of the space, totaling over 167 GB of collected scientific data. Carol Raymond, the mission's principal investigator, said many discoveries can still be made from analyzing this content.

Dawn's carcass will still remain in Ceres's orbit for another 20 years without fuel, totally unable to communicate.

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NASA Announces End of Dawn Spacecraft Mission via TecMundo