It's a space engineer's worst nightmare — losing contact with your spacecraft — and it looks like it just happened to NASA. The government space agency has officially put an end to its Deep Impact mission after losing contact with the space probe in August.
NASA was last able to communicate with the Deep Impact probe Aug. 8, and after more than a month of attempting to reestablish communications with the spacecraft, the space agency is "reluctantly" calling it quits. NASA has not offered an explanation for why communcation was lost between ground control and the space probe.
"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," said Mike A'Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator from the University of Maryland in College Park. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity."
During its nine years in space, the Deep Impact comet probe was able to transmit approximately 500,000 images of cosmic objects while becoming the most traveled comet research mission in history, logging around 4.7 billion miles in space. The spacecraft delivered results soon after it was launched in 2005.
"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," said Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."
The probe continued to beam information to scientists have on Earth throughout its lifetime, collecting data on stars, planets, the sun, the moon and even Earth. Scientists have still not sifted through all the data, which NASA expects will offer plenty of new insights.
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