NASA’s Deep Impact Mission Ends

For the last decade Deep Impact has been NASA’s comet hunter and has sent back unprecedented images of comets from space. However 9 years and 500,000 images later the NASA team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has had to announce that the mission is now over.

It completed its original mission of determining the surface and interior composition of a comet, over s period of six months in 2005. It also did extended missions such as observing comet fly pasts and sending home data about planets as well before it finally lost communication with Earth.

The decision to call it quits was made after communications with the probe named Deep Impact failed about a month ago. Despite repeated efforts the team has been unable to communicate with the probe. History’s most traveled comet research mission, having traveled 4.7 billion miles has finally called it a day.

Deep Impact has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity, said Mike A’Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland in College Park. It has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned, said Mike. This was one science project whose success NASA would love to replicate.