14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has called it, the Deep Impact probe is officially dead. The NASA team handling it had lost contact last month and is now convinced that the probe is lost forever. The team was expecting to get a few more years of observations out of the spacecraft, but an unexpected loss in communication put an end to those plans.
That said, Deep Impact has more than done its duty. It completed its initial mission back in 2005 and a secondary extended mission several years later.
The probe was supposed to get close enough to a comet, Tempel 1, to study its external and internal composition. It did this within six months of its launch in 2005. In 2010 it encountered its second comet, Hartley 2. Since then, it has been doing various scientific observations of stars as well as nearby objects such as the Moon or Mars.
It's unclear what happened to the probe when NASA lost contact. One theory is that a problem with the computer system could have led to the probe being unable to orientate properly, meaning its antennas would not line up with Earth, so it could no commands or send any data.
A bigger problem is that this also meant it couldn't orientate its solar panels towards the sun. Without power, the internal components likely froze.