NASA Cancels Mission to Visit Two Asteroids

NASA’s Dawn mission to visit two asteroids has been canceled, five months after the program was put on hold because of cost overruns and technical problems.

The project was capped at about $371 million, project scientists had said. But scientists asked for an additional $40 million last year for the mission, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. The Dawn spacecraft was supposed to lift off in June on a nine-year voyage to two of the solar system’s largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, which reside in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.