NASA's Deep Impact Mission Comes To An Unexpected End

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has finally decided to put an end to its comet investigating Deep Impact mission. The reason why NASA had to abandon this mission is that in August 2013 it had lost contact with the spaceship and despite numerous attempts spanning several weeks they were unable to uplink commands to reactivate the onboard systems. As NASA tries to pinpoint the cause, early analysis shows that there could have been a problem with the computer time tagging that in turn affected the spacecraft’s orientation. This change in orientation altered the position of the radio antennas which heavily affected the communication link. Finally since the solar panels could not be pointed in the right direction due to the skewed orientation of the spacecraft it would have lost all power and the extreme cold temperatures of outer space would have ruined the onboard electronics.

Deep Impact

Despite its unfortunate end, the Deep Impact spacecraft had completed its purpose. The spacecraft’s original six month mission inspecting the comet Tempel 1 was already over in its launch year of 2005. The spacecraft was later sent to conduct a flyby of comet Hartley 2 in 2010. Since the team back at NASA were quite impressed by its work they decided to continue the mission and in 2012 they managed to capture a few shots of the comet ISON. To bid a final adieu to this movie inspired spacecraft do pay a visit to its #-Link-Snipped-# to have a look at its nine year journey.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#

Replies

  • Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Its a time to rethink on the cause of problem.Can self repairing robots or robots have any applications over these kind of incidebts.
  • Suhel Inamdar
    Suhel Inamdar
    Its awesome.

You are reading an archived discussion.

Related Posts

hey! RAM as a active memory that store the data temporary before it's putted in permanent memory like HDD,FDD etc. how comes 1GB RAM store the file(folder) with 10GB? Example...
Not all of us have iPhones, but that does not seem to deter iPhone users to insert their favorite emojis in the texts they post on the internet. So times...
You may be Google fan, but this round of 'speed' definitely goes to Microsoft's Bing. Bing's engineering team has rolled out a new feature - called 'Bing Page Zero' that...
Flipkart's fans note - you no longer have to use the crappy mobile website presented as an app. The much awaited native Flipkart Android app comes after 1.5 years of...
HTC One Mini, the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer's flagship phone, is going in to follow the trend of the recently launched the 24-carat gold version of the HTC One. Yep, the...