NASA bids farewell to satellite

NASA crashed a nine-year-old satellite into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean Sunday.

The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory re-entered the Earth's atmosphere early Sunday morning. As planned, pieces of the observatory that survived re-entry landed in the Pacific Ocean approximately 4,000 km southeast of Hawaii.

Compton was launched April 5, 1991 and died after completing 51,658 orbits of the Earty.

The agency decided in March to dump the $670 million satellite after one of the observatory's three gyroscopes failed. NASA decided to bring the satellite back via a controlled re-entry.

Officials were worried that if more equipment failed, engineers wouldn't be able to control the vehicle and the satellite might make a random return to Earth.

Some scientists were saddened by the decision to destroy the satellite. Project scientist Neil Gehrels says the people who had to make the decision had to consider safety. "But from a scientific point of view, it is a great loss."

Astronomers say Compton has changed the way the universe is viewed.

Compton was the first major space observatory to make a systematic survey of natural sources of gamma rays, invisible rays that are the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scientists have written about 2,000 papers based on data from Compton. More than 100 astronomers annually used the spacecraft to make observations.

Compton was the second of NASA's orbiting observatories. Two others, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, are still in orbit.