Herschel space telescope finishes mission
Source: BBC
29 April 2013 Last updated at 16:06 GMT
Herschel space telescope finishes mission
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
Europe's flagship space telescope has stopped working.
The billion-euro Herschel observatory has run out of the liquid helium needed to keep its instruments and detectors at their ultra-low functioning temperature.
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Herschel, which was sensitive to far-infrared and sub-millimetre light, was launched in 2009 to study the birth of stars and the evolution of galaxies.
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Controllers at the European Space Agency's (Esa) operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, will run some final tests on the spacecraft in the coming weeks before putting it in a slow drift around the Sun.
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Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21934520