NASA's Comet Hunting Spacecraft Signs Off After Nearly Nine Years of Research

After more than a month of failed attempts at communication, NASA researchers have officially declared the comet-hunting spacecraft Deep Impact dead.

Launched in January 2005, the spacecraft completed its original mission of investigating the surface and interior composition of a comet within just six months -- blasting material from the comet Tempel 1 into space where the spacecraft could then examine it.

A subsequent extended mission culminated in the flyby of comet Hartley 2 roughly five years later, at which point the spacecraft was adapted into a kind of space-borne planetary observatory.

"Six months after launch, this spacecraft had already completed its planned mission to study comet Tempel 1," Tim Larson, project manager of Deep Impact at JPL, said in a press release. "But the science team kept finding interesting things to do, and through the ingenuity of our mission team and navigators and support of NASA's Discovery Program, this spacecraft kept it up for more than eight years, producing amazing results all along the way."

Deep Impact granted scientists a unique look into the imagery and composition of a distant comet known as C/2009 P1 in 2012, for example, and took images of comet ISON, currently hurtling toward the Sun's outer reaches, as recently as this year. Among its greatest accomplishments was aiding in the confirmation of water on the Moon.

In all, the spacecraft logged a total of 4.7 billion miles and gathered nearly 500,000 images before it lost contact with Earth in August, possibly due to a problem with computer time tagging -- an issue that could have caused the spacecraft to lose control of its orientation.

"Despite this unexpected final curtain call, Deep Impact already achieved much more than ever was envisioned," said Lindley Johnson, the Discovery Program Executive at NASA Headquarters, and the Program Executive for the mission since a year before it launched. "Deep Impact has completely overturned what we thought we knew about comets and also provided a treasure trove of additional planetary science that will be the source data of research for years to come."