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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-196&rn=news.xml&rst=6901
With the push of a button, final commands for the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder mission were beamed to space on July 18, a final goodbye before the spacecraft was powered down.
LISA Pathfinder had been directed into a parking orbit in April, keeping it out of Earth's way. The final action this week switches it off completely after a successful 16 months of science measurements.
While some spacecraft are flashy, never sitting still as they zip across the solar system, LISA Pathfinder was as steady as they come -- literally.
It housed a space-age motion detector so sensitive that it had to be protected against the force of photons from the Sun. That was made possible thanks to a system of thrusters that applied tiny reactive forces to the spacecraft, cancelling out the force of the Sun and allowing the spacecraft to stay within 10 nanometers of an ideal gravitational orbit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @06:39PM
It's a shame they didn't get funding to do the proposed extension mission [arxiv.org] where they'd have used it to search for evidence of MOND [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure Nobel prizes will be forthcoming anyway for the discovery of gravitational waves.