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After telling us that DAWN was indefinitely delayed a few months ago, the mission has now been offcially canned.<br /><br />Question:<br />1. What happens to the 90% complete hardware?<br />2. What happens to the engineers that have spent their careers designing and building this spacecraft?<br />3. Who gets fired for wasting $371 million?<br /><font color="yellow"><br />Asteroid mission canceled in latest NASA setback<br /><br />LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA on Thursday canceled a mission to visit two asteroids, five months after the program was put on hold because of cost overruns and technical problems.<br /><br />The cancellation is the latest setback for NASA, which has been forced to delay science missions to focus on developing a new manned spacecraft to return to the moon in the next decade.<br /><br />The project was capped at around $371 million, project scientists said previously. But scientists asked for an additional $40 million last year.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Asteroids are believed to be remnants from the solar system's formation about 4.5 billion years ago, and studying them could provide clues into how the sun and planets formed.<br /><br />Dawn would have been the first spacecraft to orbit the two asteroids, which scientists believe formed in different parts of the solar system and had different evolutionary processes.<br /><br />Dawn was part of a NASA program called Discovery that aims to explore the solar system on what the space agency considers to be a shoestring budget. The program includes the Stardust mission, which returned to Earth in January with samples of comet dust.<br /><br />The Dawn mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<br />Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. </font>/safety_wrapper>