Agency Will Fund Mission After All

The little space program that refused to die, will live on after all. That's the word NASA gave administrators overseeing the much-maligned Dawn program, just weeks after the agency killed the project because of ongoing technical and budgetary woes.

In fact, those administrators appear to be the heroes of the Dawn project: scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who vehemently objected to the program's cancellation on March 2. Shortly after their appeal, NASA agreed to review its earlier assessment of the beleagured project: that it was out of money, and out of time.

Now... not so much.

"Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed," NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who led the review panel, said in a statement.

The mission, a $446 million scientific excursion to study the distant asteroids Ceres and Vesta, is set to launch in May 2007. The program was originally capped at $371 million, and was placed on stand down last year after scientists requested an additional $40 million.

Ceres and Vesta are believed to have formed in different parts of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, and scientists are hoping to learn clues of how the sun and planets formed.

NASA says students will also be able to follow along as the probe is built, launched and flies to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

FMI: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/