NASA spacecraft runs out of fuel after 7 billion km journey
The Dawn spacecraft ended its 11-year space research mission with many valuable images and scientific information.
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The Dawn spacecraft stopped operating after 11 years of space exploration. |
NASA announced that Dawn, the spacecraft studying the two largest objects in the solar system's asteroid belt, ran out of fuel on November 1.BGRNewsThe spacecraft did not make contact with Earth on October 31 and November 1, as scheduled. In fact, its operation time was longer than originally planned.
"Today, we celebrate the Dawn mission for its incredible engineering achievements, its invaluable science, and the entire team that helped make these discoveries possible. The incredible images and data Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are essential to understanding the history and evolution of the solar system," said NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen.
Dawn was launched in 2007 to study the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. In its 11 years of operation, the spacecraft has traveled nearly 7 billion kilometers, sending back some 95,000 images and more than 167 gigabytes of scientific data. The spacecraft ran out of fuel while exploring Ceres and is expected to remain in orbit for the next decade or so.
The Dawn spacecraft has been decommissioned, but its contributions to science are still invaluable. The data it sent back still contains many mysteries that experts hope will be successfully solved in the future.
