Dusk for Dawn mission to asteroids

[eppur_se_muova]

By Eleanor Imster in Human World | Space | November 3, 2018

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has gone silent. The mission to explore the 2 largest bodies in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, is at an end.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has gone silent. The spacecraft missed scheduled communications sessions with NASA’s Deep Space Network on Wednesday (October 31, 2018) and Thursday (November 1). After the flight team eliminated other possible causes for the missed communications, mission managers concluded that the spacecraft finally ran out of hydrazine, the fuel that enables the spacecraft to control its pointing. With its hydrazine depleted, NASA said, Dawn can no longer keep its antennas trained on Earth to communicate with mission control or turn its solar panels to the sun to recharge.

The Dawn spacecraft launched in September 2007. Its mission was visit the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt – Vesta and Ceres. The spacecraft as traveled 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion km) and is currently in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will remain for decades.

Propelled by ion engines, the spacecraft achieved many firsts along the way. In 2011, when Dawn arrived at Vesta, the second largest world in the main asteroid belt, the spacecraft became the first to orbit a body in the region between Mars and Jupiter. In 2015, when Dawn went into orbit around Ceres, a dwarf planet that is also the largest world in the asteroid belt, the mission became the first to visit a dwarf planet and go into orbit around two destinations beyond Earth.
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more: https://earthsky.org/space/dawn-mission-asteroid-end-nov2018

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. An incredible mission. The only craft to orbit two unexplored worlds

and they did it with multiple reaction wheels failed. Amazing work by the engineers to complete the mission, and more, while coping with that.

Dr. Rayman's blog has been fascinating - he wrote in August about how the signal was likely to be lost:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/blog/2018/8/dear-dawnouements

and they expected that mid-September to mid-October, so it kept going just a bit longer. As ever.

[Judi Lynn]

2. What a wonderful video, incredible images sent home.

Too bad DAWN can't be retrieved and kept here forever.

What an amazing accomplishment.

DAWN outdid expectations so capably.

Thank you.