The announcement that the Dawn spacecraft is running out of its hydrazine fuel was not unexpected, but when we prepare to lose communications with a trailblazing craft, the moment is always tinged with a bit of melancholy. Even so, the accomplishments of this mission in its 11 years of data gathering are phenomenal. They also speak to the virtues of extended missions, which in this case gave us views and a wealth of information about Vesta but also a continuation of its stunning orbital operations around Ceres. And at Ceres it will stay, a silent orbiting monument to deep space exploration.

“Dawn’s legacy is that it explored two of the last uncharted worlds in the inner Solar System,” said Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California, who serves as Dawn’s mission director and chief engineer. “Dawn has shown us alien worlds that for two centuries were just pinpoints of light amidst the stars. And it has produced these richly detailed, intimate portraits and revealed exotic, mysterious landscapes unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

Image: This artist’s rendering shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft maneuvering above Ceres with its ion propulsion system. Dawn arrived into orbit at Ceres on March 6, 2015, and continues to collect data about the mysterious and fascinating world. The mission celebrated its ninth launch anniversary on September 27, 2016. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

Speaking of Marc Rayman, he deserves great thanks for his efforts at keeping an ongoing chronicle of Dawn operations available in his Dawn Journal. In his latest entry, Rayman notes how he always had to write these entries in haste because of his full schedule, but it’s the mark of a gifted narrator that haste is never an impression the reader comes away with. He has always seemed to be a patient and thorough writer who took the time to get things right.

The last two entries have been cases in point, describing the end of the Dawn mission and what is happening aboard the spacecraft. Immediately ahead is the final act, the loss of hydrazine that will eventually cause Dawn to lose the ability to orient itself — this could occur within weeks — and thus the spacecraft will no longer be able to point its solar panels at the Sun or its radio antenna at Earth (Dawn’s reaction wheels failed earlier in the mission, making hydrazine a critical factor). Radio silence will ensue. What happens next is an interesting question:

We also took a short look at the long-term fate of the spacecraft. To ensure the integrity of possible future exploration that may focus on the chemistry related to life, planetary protection protocols dictate that Dawn not contact Ceres for at least 20 years. Despite being in an orbit that regularly dips so low, the spaceship will continue to revolve around its gravitational master for at least that long and, with very high confidence, for more than 50 years. The terrestrial materials that compose the probe will not contaminate the alien world before another Earth ship could arrive.

So we have a window of about 50 years and perhaps more before Dawn will come down on Ceres, and Rayman’s inference here is that this gives time to mount another mission to Ceres before any contamination could occur. But given that it has also been 50 years since Apollo, I for one don’t necessarily see this as a very large window, and can only hope that its presence will be a motivator for a return to the dwarf planet before we have to wonder whether what we find there could have been affected by anything from Earth.

Dawn is the only spacecraft to orbit a body in the asteroid belt, and it is also the only spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial destinations, a feat that was accomplished thanks to its ion propulsion system. Dawn reached the 4.5 billion year old Vesta in 2011 and spent 14 months orbiting it, showing us a mountain at the center of the Rheasilvia basin that turns out to be twice the height of Mt. Everest, along with multiple canyons that fit into Grand Canyon scale. We also learned that Vesta, with its violent history, was the source of a common family of meteorites.

Ceres turned out to be even more of a surprise, with its bright salty deposits made up of sodium carbonate in the form of a slushy brine that originated from below the crust. Some regions on Ceres were geologically active in comparatively recent times, indicating a deep reservoir of liquid. Organic molecules turned up in the area around Ernutet Crater, but we lack the instrumentation aboard the spacecraft to be able to say whether they were formed by any biological processes. “There is growing evidence that the organics in Ernutet came from Ceres’ interior, in which case they could have existed for some time in the early interior ocean,” said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn’s project scientist and deputy principal investigator at JPL.

With its high-resolution images, gamma ray and neutron spectra, infrared spectra, and gravity data, Dawn has delivered full value and continues, as this JPL news release reminds us, to “swoop over Ceres about 22 miles (35 kilometers) from its surface — only about three times the altitude of a passenger jet.” For his part, Marc Rayman thinks about Dawn after it goes silent as “an inert, celestial monument to human creativity and ingenuity,” which it is. But the data Dawn gathered still lives, and will resonate in the form of discoveries and new papers for decades.

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