Washington, Sept 21 (ANI): After almost 9 years in space, communication problems has led scientist to reluctantly pronounce the end of NASA's Deep Space Comet Hunter Mission.
NASA's Deep Impact mission approximately sent 500,000 images of celestial objects.
The project team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., has reluctantly pronounced the mission at an end after being unable to communicate with the spacecraft for over a month.
The last communication with the probe was Aug. 8. Deep Impact was history's most traveled comet research mission, going about 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers).
Deep Impact successfully completed its original bold mission of six months in 2005 to investigate both the surface and interior composition of a comet, and a subsequent extended mission of another comet flyby and observations of planets around other stars that lasted from July 2007 to December 2010.
Since then, the spacecraft has been continually used as a space-borne planetary observatory to capture images and other scientific data on several targets of opportunity with its telescopes and instrumentation. aunched in January 2005, the spacecraft first travelled about 268 million miles (431 million kilometers) to the vicinity of comet Tempel 1. (ANI)
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