Space Orbiter Ulysses to End 18-year Mission

June 28th, 2009

On June 30, 2009 the space orbiter will end an 18 year run of exploration. The Ulysses was the first spacecraft to survey the environment in space above and below the poles of the Sun in the four dimensions of space and time.

“Ulysses has taught us far more than we ever expected about the Sun and the way it interacts with the space surrounding it,” said Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. The shut-down of the satellite is a joint decision of the two agencies and comes a year after the mission was expected to end.

For more on the discoveries that Ulysses has been given credit for take a look here.

But as Ulysses has moved further from Earth, the communications bit-rate has gone down, and the mission managers decided they could no longer justify the cost of keeping Ulysses in operation. Probably have cellular phones with better pic resolution than that does these days…lol

“We expected the spacecraft to cease functioning much earlier,” said Paolo Ferri, Head of the Spacecraft Operations Solar and Planetary Missions Division. “Its longevity is a tribute to Ulysses’s builders and the people involved in operations over the years. Although it is always hard to take the decision to terminate a mission, we have to accept that the satellite is running out of resources and a controlled switch-off is the best ending.”

After shut-off, Ulysses will continue to orbit the Sun, becoming in effect a man-made ‘comet’.

“Whenever any of us look up in the years to come, Ulysses will be there, silently orbiting our star, which it studied so successfully during its long and active life,” said Marsden.