NASA Declares End to Deep Impact Comet Mission
Launched in 2005, the spacecraft memorably smashed a copper-jacketed probe into the comet Tempel 1 at 22,800 miles an hour (36,700 kilometers an hour) on July 4 of that year. It then flew through the debris cloud to capture the resultant fireworks, the first close inspection of a comet’s interior. (See “‘Deep Impact’ Comet Revealed by NASA Flyby.”)
The $267 million spacecraft later flew by the comet Hartley 2 in 2010, and this year it captured images of comet ISON, which is headed toward a close encounter with the sun in November.
But now the Deep Impact spacecraft appears to be lost.
“The mission revolutionized the way we think about comets and raised all sorts of questions we still have to answer,” said chief mission scientist Mike A’Hearn of the University of Maryland.
Mission controllers last radioed the spacecraft on August 8, after which communications were lost, according to a statement from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. After a month of attempts to restore communications through the NASA Deep Space Network, the controllers have declared the mission “lost,” concluding that a computer glitch likely doomed the spacecraft.