LOS ANGELES – A NASA spacecraft built to explore two of the solar system’s largest asteroids won’t be launched this year because the space agency is dealing with cost overruns and technical issues in the project.
The planned summer launch of the Dawn spacecraft has been indefinitely postponed, said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA’s solar system division.
Mission managers were ordered to halt work on Dawn in the fall while the project was assessed by an independent review team, which is expected to present its findings to NASA on Friday.
Even if NASA gives Dawn the green light, it would take another year for engineers to finish routine testing of the spacecraft, said mission principal investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dawn is part of a NASA program called Discovery that seeks to explore the solar system on what for NASA is considered a shoestring budget. The program includes the Stardust mission, which last week returned to Earth with samples of comet dust.
Dawn, however, has suffered several setbacks, including ruptures of two of its fuel tanks during testing, forcing engineers to reduce the amount of xenon gas that will be loaded into the tanks.
The project was capped at $371 million, according to Russell, and when project scientists asked for an extra $40 million last year, NASA ordered the halt to figure out why it was going over budget.
Powered by an ion engine fueled by xenon gas, Dawn was to make a nine-year journey to Ceres and Vesta, in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Asteroids are believed to be remnants from the solar system’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, and studying them could provide clues into how the sun and planets formed.
The two asteroids are believed to have formed in different parts of the solar system and to have undergone different evolutionary processes.
Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid at about 600 miles long, appears to have a warm surface and evidence of a weak atmosphere. Vesta is about 320 miles long and appears to have been resurfaced by basaltic lava.
Associated Press
NASA scientists work on the Dawn spacecraft, which had been targeted for launch in the summer.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
