science · 20 September 2013 · 11 years ago
In 2013, the Deep Impact spacecraft was declared dead by NASA after nine productive years making fly-bys of comets. Radio contact was suddenly and permanently lost on 8 Aug 2013, perhaps caused by a failure causing the solar panels and antenna to point in the wrong direction. Without power, it likely froze up. It had been launched on 12 Jan 2005 to release a special impactor spacecraft to crash (3 Jul 2005) into comet Tempel 1, so after the impact (4 Jul 2005), the ejecta plume could be studied spectroscopically to reveal its composition. Deep Impact continued as the EPOXI mission and took images during fly-bys of comet Hartley 2 (4 Nov 2010) and comet Garradd (Jan 2012). Towards its end of life, it was studying comet Ison.
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