The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) on Monday revived a project to send a probe to explore two of the solar system’s biggest asteroids, nearly four weeks after the Dawn mission had been cancelled due to cost overruns and technical glitches.
The probe would travel to the huge Vesta and Ceres asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, the United States space agency said.
The mission, named Dawn because it was designed to study objects from the early days of the solar system, would use an electric propulsion system and orbit multiple objects.
Nasa decided to reinstate the mission after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the agency in charge of the mission, called for Dawn’s revival.
”We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them,” said Nasa Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired a panel that reviewed the project.
”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,” Geveden said in a statement.
Dawn was approved in December 2001 and was scheduled to launch in June 2006.
But technical and other problems delayed the launch to July 2007 and boosted the mission’s cost from an initial estimate of $373-million to $446-million, Nasa said.
Dawn had been cancelled on March 2 after $257-million had been spent on the mission. Another $14-million would have been needed to kill the project, Nasa said. – AFP
