The Surprising Coincidence Between Two Overachieving NASA Missions
Two vastly different NASA spacecraft are about to run out of fuel: The Kepler spacecraft, which spent nine years in deep space collecting data that detected thousands of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, and the Dawn spacecraft, which spent 11 years orbiting and studying the main asteroid belt's two largest objects, Vesta and Ceres. However, the two record-setting missions have more in common than their coincidentally low fuel levels. Both missions gathered data that broke new scientific ground, searching for answers inside and outside our solar system. Illustration of NASA's Dawn spacecraft, with its distinctive ion propulsion. Credit: NASA Launched in 2007, Dawn was the first spacecraft to orbit a body between Mars and Jupiter, and the first to orbit more than one deep-space destination. From 2011 to 2012, Dawn studied the asteroid Vesta before pulling off an unprecedented maneuver by leaving orbit and traveling to Ceres, which it observed for over...