14 DAY TRIAL // The Herschel Space Telescope has officially shut down, thus officially ending its four-year mission. The hydrogen that was keeping the instruments cool enough for science to be done ran out in April.
Since then, the team has been making preparations for the space telescope's final resting place. There were some ideas of sending it crashing to the moon, but the team eventually decided to park it in a heliocentric orbit, inside Earth's orbit.
In that orbit, it should be stable for at least a few hundred years. The final commands issued to the craft expended the little fuel that remained and made the final adjustments to its trajectory. All equipment was then shut down.
Herschel had a finite amount of fuel, so its mission was known to be short from the get-go. But the data it has gathered to date will help scientists discover new things about the universe for years to go.