Lost contact with the Deep Impact spacecraft

NASA had to announce the end of the mission that lasted almost nine years, during which the spacecraft launched a projectile that collided with a comet and threw materials from its shells, observed other comets and even planets outside the solar system

After almost nine years in space, the Deep Impact mission ended, when its highlights were a projectile shot to hit one comet, a flyby of a second comet, and the transmission of about half a million images of celestial objects.

The project team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California unenthusiastically announced that the mission had come to an end after being unable to contact the spacecraft for over a month. The last contact with Deep Impact was on August 8, 2013. Deep Impact was the great comet hunter. in history after covering 7.6 million km.

"Deep Impact was a fantastic spacecraft that survived a long time and produced much more data than we planned," says Mike O'Hearn, principal investigator of the Deep Impact mission at the University of Maryland in College Park. "She caused a revolution in our understanding of comets and their activity."
Deep Impact successfully completed its complicated original mission in six months in 2005 - investigating the surface and internal composition of a comet, and a follow-up mission with a flyby of another comet and observation of planets around other stars between July 2007 and December 2010. Since then, the spacecraft has continued to serve as a deep space observatory, To photograph the planets and collect some data on some occasional targets using the telescope and the instruments the spacecraft was equipped with.

The spacecraft was launched in January 2005 and flew about 430 million kilometers until it came close to the comet Temple 1. On July 3, 2005, the spacecraft launched a projectile into the orbit of the comet that collided with Galaino on July 4. This caused materials below the core's surface to fly into space so that they could be examined by the telescope and other instruments of the passing spacecraft. 16 days after the encounter with the comet, the spacecraft team placed it on a flight path back to Earth and in 2007 he aimed it at another comet - Hartley 2 where it arrived in November 2010.

"Six months after launch, this spacecraft has already completed its planned mission to study comet Temple 1," says Tim Larson, Deep Impact Project Manager at JPL. "However, the scientific team continued to look for interesting things to do, and although the wisdom of our crew members in navigation and the support of NASA's Project Discovery personnel, the spacecraft continued to operate for another eight years and provided amazing results all along the way."

The spacecraft's extended mission culminated in a successful flyby of Comet Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. Along the way, it also observed six different stars and confirmed the motion of the planets around them as well as photographed Earth, the Moon and Mars. These data helped to confirm the existence of water on the moon and were an attempt to confirm the signature of methane in the Martian atmosphere. One sequence of breathtaking images showed the moon passing by the Earth.

In January 2012, Deep Impact photographed comet C/2009 P1 (Garad) and in June of this year (2013) it managed to take the first images of comet Ison.

After losing communication with the spacecraft last month, control crew members spent several weeks trying to broadcast to it to restart its systems. The exact reason for the loss of the spacecraft is unknown. NASA estimates that this is a malfunction in the computer's time marking system that may lead to a loss of control over the direction of Deep Impact. This may affect the direction of the radio antennas and make communication difficult, as well as the position of the solar collectors which in turn will prevent the spacecraft from receiving the power needed for heating and cooling of the space may destroy the equipment, and freeze the battery and drive systems.

Despite the unexpected ending, Deep Impact has already achieved much more than we ever anticipated," said Lindley Johnson, director of the Discovery program at NASA Headquarters and responsible for the program that began a year before launch. "Deep Impact revolutionized the way we thought about comets and provided a treasure trove of data for planetary science that will serve as a source of research for years to come.

For information on the NASA website

Live updates from the Deep Impact mission - as reported on the Hidaan website in July 2005

About the second big mission of Deep Impact - a pass by Comet Hartley 2