UNLIKE Odysseus, who found his way home 10 years after the Trojan war, the solar probe called Ulysses is destined to until death.
Ground controllers are now pulling the plug on the probe, which was launched in 1990 by NASA and the European Space Agency. In its 18-year epic journey, the probe has flown through three comet tails, studied magnetic fields around the sun and Jupiter, and found interstellar dust blowing through the solar system. It is the only craft to fly by the sun鈥檚 poles three times 鈥� capturing snapshots of its 11-year solar cycle.
In 2008, low power threatened to freeze the probe鈥檚 remaining fuel, but the team managed to keep it going. Now fuel is running low, plus it is sending back little data, so NASA and ESA have opted to turn off its transmitter, which sends data back to Earth.
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鈥淲e鈥檇 already gone a year more than we thought we could, so we thought it would be a good time to get out,鈥� says Ed Massey, NASA project manager for Ulysses. After its death, Ulysses will continue to orbit the sun on a path that takes it outside the orbits of the planets, where it will effectively become an artificial comet.