Thursday, 1 November 2018

Sun sets on Dawn spacecraft's asteroid belt mission

Artist's concept showing Dawn arriving at the dwarf planet Ceres

After 11 years exploring the asteroid belt, NASA's Dawn mission has come to the end. On Monday, the space agency confirmed that all contact has been lost with the deep space probe after it failed to make two scheduled communications with the Deep Space Network (DSN) on October 31 and November 1, 2018. Having eliminated other possibilities, the Dawn team has concluded that the unmanned spacecraft has finally run out of the hydrazine propellant needed to point its radio antenna at the Earth and its solar panels at the Sun.

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from New Atlas (Gizmag) https://ift.tt/2Qe2j1t

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