NASA Reinstates Dawn Asteroid Mission The Dawn of Time by Staff Writers Washington DC (SPX) Mar 27, 2006 NASA officials announced Monday that the agency has decided to reinstate the Dawn mission, a robotic exploration of two major asteroids that had been canceled earlier this month because of technical problems and cost overruns. The new decision arrived in a letter from Rex. D. Geveden, the agency’s associate administrator for science missions, to Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was developing Dawn. It followed an appeal of the decision by JPL. Officials had named the mission Dawn because it was designed to study objects dating from the beginning of the solar system. Its planned trajectory would have taken it to Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest asteroids orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, including planned orbits of each object via an advanced electric ion-propulsion system. The mission originally was approved in December 2001 and set for launch this June, but technical problems and other difficulties delayed the projected launch date to July 2007 and pushed its cost from the original estimate of $373 million to $446 million. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin decided to cancel Dawn on March 2, after about $257 million already had been spent. Officials estimated that about $14 million more needed to be spent to terminate the project. The reinstatement resulted from a review process established by Griffin and intended to …
