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.

FMI: www.nasa.gov