Tue, Mar 07, 2006
Dawn Is Dead
There will be no new
"Dawn" for NASA. The agency officially announced this weekend that
the Dawn program -- which would have sent an unmanned probe on
a nine-year voyage to two of the solar system's largest asteroids,
Ceres and Vesta -- has been cancelled.
In January, NASA announced the program would be delayed while the agency
struggled to contain cost overruns and budgetary woes that had
plagued the project... but that still gave scientists
hope their spacecraft would one day fly.
"After you‘ve worked on something for so long and put your
heart and soul into it, this is heartwrenching," Bruce Barraclough,
a Dawn science team member from Los Alamos National Lab in New
Mexico, told the Associated Press.
According to Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA's solar system
division, the cost factors associated with Dawn worked against the
program's continuance -- as did 29 separate technical issues
recognized by an independent investigatory team.
"The more we dug, the more we became concerned," Dantzler
said.
In a prepared statement, JPL director Charles Elachi said the
technical problems could have been fixed in time to launch the
spacecraft by spring 2007 -- although, he acknowledged, the mission
would have gone over budget.
Funds that would have gone towards the Dawn program will be
shifted to NASA's ongoing quest to develop a next-generation manned
spaceflight vehicle -- which NASA plans to use to send astronauts
back to the moon by 2018.
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