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Space Communications NASA

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Is Dead (theverge.com) 86

Posted by BeauHD from the bad-week-for-space-explorers dept.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has run out of fuel, leading the agency to officially end its mission of exploring the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. "Today, we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission -- its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it gave us and the entire team who enabled the spacecraft to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "The astounding images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are critical to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system," Zurbuchen added. Space.com reports: The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, which are about 330 miles (530 kilometers) and 590 miles (950 km) wide, respectively. Scientists regard these two bodies as leftovers from the solar system's planet-formation period, which explains the mission's name. Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011, then scrutinized the object from orbit for 14 months. The probe's work revealed many intriguing details about Vesta. For example, liquid water once flowed across the protoplanet's surface (likely after buried ice was melted by meteorite impacts), and Vesta sports a towering peak near its south pole that's nearly as tall as Mars' famous Olympus Mons volcano. Dawn left Vesta in September 2012.

The mission team concluded that Dawn had run out of hydrazine after the probe missed scheduled communication check-ins yesterday (Oct. 31) and today. Hydrazine is the fuel used by Dawn's pointing thrusters, so the spacecraft can no longer orient itself to study Ceres, relay data to Earth or recharge its solar panels. Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, and probably much longer than that. Mission team members have said there's a greater than 99 percent probability that the probe won't spiral down onto Ceres' frigid, battered surface for at least five more decades. It's been a rough week for space explorers as not only did Dawn run out of fuel, but the Kepler telescope did too and had to be retired.
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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Is Dead More

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Is Dead

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  • So does that mean? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Dawn of the Dead?

  • Not dead ... resting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02, 2018 @02:54AM (#57579480)

    It ran out of gas in the middle of no where. Eventually someone will retrieve it.... in about 50 years. I hope it and the Mars rovers will someday be put in a Museum, though I'll probably be long dead myself before that happens.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      You are right that someone may retrieve it, but that is because it is not in the middle of nowhere. It's in orbit around an object that is rather easy to track, and is the largest object in its class (asteroid) by far. If it's not disturbed, and we as a species live long enough, then someone will pay it a visit.

    • It ran out of gas in the middle of no where. Eventually someone will retrieve it.... in about 50 years.

      We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years which is FAR easier to get to. Thinking we're going to be back to Ceres to retrieve a dead probe within another 50 years seems extremely improbable. I know we're all excited about what SpaceX and the rest are doing but let's pump the brakes slightly shall we? Our progress in space isn't going that quickly. Nobody is going to fund a mission to retrieve this thing because there is no economic or scientific value in doing so. If we do send a craft capable of ret

      • My first computer only had 64k memory and my current one has 16GB. Cellphones used to be lugged around in cases, now they can fit on my wrist. People used to say humans can't fly. Therefore we will get the probe within 50 years.

        • My first computer only had 64k memory and my current one has 16GB. Cellphones used to be lugged around in cases, now they can fit on my wrist. People used to say humans can't fly. Therefore we will get the probe within 50 years.

          Five hundred years ago, the fastest a human being had ever travelled was 25mph on a horse. A hundred years ago, early planes could reach 100mph. Fifty years ago, the Apollo missions travelled at 24,000 mph.

          In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.

          • In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.

            We tend to be much better at predicting the past than the future.

          • Five hundred years ago, the fastest a human being had ever travelled was 25mph on a horse. A hundred years ago, early planes could reach 100mph. Fifty years ago, the Apollo missions travelled at 24,000 mph. In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.

            You've been watching too many science fiction movies. Presuming you aren't trolling, I admire the optimism but it isn't going to go down like that. You are just extrapolating naively based on unrelated past events with cherry picked data. There is no evidence based reason to believe your hypothesis and considerable evidence to doubt it. Our progress in the last 50 years has been somewhere between mild incremental advancement and a regression in capabilities. The economics of space travel haven't improv

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Five hundred years ago, the fastest a human being had ever travelled was 25mph on a horse. A hundred years ago, early planes could reach 100mph. Fifty years ago, the Apollo missions travelled at 24,000 mph.

            In another fifty years, we'll have space liners going several times the speed of light, and popping to an asteroid will be like walking over the road to a corner shop.

            Not sure if this was intended seriously or not.

            A real account of human travel is that humans were limited to 4 MPH for long distances, until they learned to ride horses about 5500 years ago, and then they reached 25 MPH. But that reached the limit of the new technique no further progress was made for 5300 years.

            The steam locomotives were invented, and then internal combustion engines, and the ability to travel rose to around 100 MPH by the beginning of the 20th Century. But that came close to reaching the p

        • False equivalency (Score:4, Insightful)

          by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Friday November 02, 2018 @08:24AM (#57580316)

          My first computer only had 64k memory and my current one has 16GB. Cellphones used to be lugged around in cases, now they can fit on my wrist. People used to say humans can't fly. Therefore we will get the probe within 50 years.

          Got any more irrelevant analogies to throw in there? How about the rate of internet adoption in third world countries or the rapid adoption of yoga pants? I have to assume you are trolling...

          Pro tip. The rate of increase of memory in your computer has fuck-all to do with the problems of deep space travel.

          Just because we've made fast progress in one field doesn't mean we are capable of making equivalently fast progress in a completely different endeavor. We've been doing space travel for about 60 years now and we haven't made more than incremental leaps in capabilities for 40 years. Most of the people reading this weren't even alive the last time we put a man on the moon.

          • Just because we've made fast progress in one field doesn't mean we are capable of making equivalently fast progress in a completely different endeavor.

            It's a bit like how we can cure some cancers but there's fuck all we can do about asperger's.

            To pick a purely arbitrary example totally at random.

          • Got any more irrelevant analogies to throw in there? How about the rate of internet adoption in third world countries or the rapid adoption of yoga pants?

            Yoga pants? Now there's an idea I can get behind.

        • The difference is that the path to making computers more powerful was already known back then and it was a matter of further miniaturizing components in an IC. How humans will travel space for long periods of time when current life support systems are feasible for short terms? The energy requirements are also daunting. There are several ideas for better propulsion that are only in experimental stages at the moment.
        • That's cool and all, but -why- would we go back to it?

      • It ran out of gas in the middle of no where. Eventually someone will retrieve it.... in about 50 years.

        We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years which is FAR easier to get to. Thinking we're going to be back to Ceres to retrieve a dead probe within another 50 years seems extremely improbable. I know we're all excited about what SpaceX and the rest are doing but let's pump the brakes slightly shall we?

        He didn't say humans. He said someone. I don't give all that good of odds that humans will even be here in 50 years, or if they are, able to send anything to space.

        • He didn't say humans. He said someone.

          Umm, if it isn't humans then who exactly? Last I checked we have no evidence of aliens with an interest in dead probes near Ceres and my border collie isn't about to start a space program any time soon no matter how many treats I offer him.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      More likely that it will come back many years later and want to talk to some whales. Lets hope there are some left.

  • 16-psyche mission (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Friday November 02, 2018 @03:20AM (#57579518)

    Upcoming mission [nasa.gov] to 16-psyche [wikipedia.org] the most interesting asteroid, 100 km diameter, known to be metallic nickel-iron. Was it originally part of the molten core of a destroyed planet? We want to know. Launches in 2022, arrives in orbit 2026. Like Dawn, has a very cool ion thrust motor, looks like old science fiction.

    • From the NASA Psyche web site: "The Psyche mission will test a sophisticated new laser communication technology that encodes data in photons (rather than radio waves) to communicate between a probe in deep space and Earth." Maybe some of the engineers laid off from the Dawn team could be employed as technical proof readers for NASA PR.
  • Can any part of the circuitry be driven sufficiently to set up an
    elecron loop (using the remaining solar energy collection) so as to
    slowly rotate the craft (via Newtons third law) into a better orientation
    for solar collection and/or observation?
    That might buy time for a better idea...
    • I suggested they reverse the neutron flow. But I will send them your suggestion as well.

      • I suggested they reverse the neutron flow. But I will send them your suggestion as well.

        Better make certain to dampen the tachyon transfer rate, or else the inertial damper field will collapse and create a temporal anomaly. We don't want to do that again!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      Can any part of the circuitry be driven sufficiently to set up an elecron loop (using the remaining solar energy collection) so as to slowly rotate the craft (via Newtons third law) into a better orientation for solar collection and/or observation?

      Good idea, but no. A current loop will push against an external magnetic field, but in the outer solar system, the external field is so weak as to be essentially zero.

      Also, there typically aren't big current loops in the circuitry of modern electronics, simply because there is no reason to put loops in.

  • Seriously, are we not doing phrasing any more?

    Or are they going to inter the entire team with the dead spacecraft, so that the team may continue to do science and otherwise support the mission in the afterlife?

  • Get a clue. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why does two incredibly successful missions coming to an expected end qualify as causing a rough week? I really wish we had some editors with a clue.

  • Dawn Journal (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Friday November 02, 2018 @07:19AM (#57580090)
    I will miss the Dawn Journal [nasa.gov] which has been a fascinating description of the engineering behind the mission.
  • Following the logic "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day" I would guess that the probe will sometimes get light enough to power itself as it orbits - likewise it might be able to send sometimes Maybe these charge and send widows could be used to take snap shot in a new mission mode rather than letting it rot. I suppose that reprogramming it the catch as you need it to and have power at the same time for now A relay satellite would be handy, to widen the send receive window enough to use the point whe
  • It seems like the point of failure for a lot of these efforts is fuel supply. They should incorporate some kind of refueling function. I think it would be much cheaper to send a fuel tank to a rendezvous then launch a replacement device. Kepler could probably run another 10 years and it's right there.

    • For roughly the same cost and effort of your fuel truck, we can send up another probe with far better capabilities.

      These probes are disposable and already way past their design life. There are a lot of other mechanical failures that have built up. And we don't build them tougher because that makes them heavier (and so would in-flight refueling).

  • "Today, we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission -- its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it gave us and the entire team who enabled the spacecraft to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement

    There was a saying in USSR, that loosely translates as: "If you don't praise yourself in the morning, all day you'll feel like having been spat on..."

  • What wasn't clear from the post is both missions (Dawn and Kepler) were both successful and lasted well past their intended mission lengths. Specifically, Dawn was finished over a year ago, and at that point they decided that they'd continue to collect data until the fuel ran out - which happened yesterday. Kepler lasted well over twice its designed mission lifetime. Again - "it still works, so we'll use it until the fuel runs out".

    Kepler ended up surveying over 500,000 stars and has detected greater than

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