NASA on Friday gave up on the Deep Impact spacecraft, which suddenly fell silent after nearly nine years of exploring comets.
The U.S. space agency declared an end to Deep Impact, which in 2005 smashed a comet with a projectile to give scientists a peek of the interior. The spacecraft went on to rendezvous with two more comets.
Last month, engineers lost contact with Deep Impact and unsuccessfully tried to regain communications. The cause of the failure was unknown, but NASA suspects the spacecraft lost control, causing its antenna and solar panels to be pointed in the wrong direction.
University of Maryland scientists, who led the team, say the spacecraft lasted longer than they imagined and returned many discoveries about how comets formed. It was history's most traveled comet research mission, going about 4.7 billion miles.
"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," Mike A'Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity."
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Launched in January 2005, the spacecraft's first job was to smash comet Tempel 1. Material from below the comet's surface was blasted into space where it could be examined.
"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," said Tim Larson, the project manager of Deep Impact at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "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."
During the mission, Deep Impact beamed back 500,000 images including of comet Ison, which could shine as bright as the moon when it makes a close approach in November.
Since there is no way for ground controllers to talk to Deep Impact, the spacecraft will continue on its path around the sun until it runs out of fuel.
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