NASA reinstates asteroid probe

NASA has announced that it will restore funding for the Dawnmission: a robotic mission to explore the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, which orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The mission, which will use a newly developed xenon ion engine, focuses on studying the 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid pair to gain insight into the origins of the solar system. The decision to reinstate the mission came less than a month after the agency terminated it because of cost overruns and technical problems. "We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them," explained NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired an agency review panel. "Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues." The mission is expected to be launched in mid-2007 at a total project cost of $446 million.