NASA recycles space probes for new missions

This is cool. By reusing probes from completed missions, they can make new missions at greatly reduced cost.

Two NASA probes well past their prime have a fresh lease on life and new missions ahead, the space agency announced Tuesday.

The motherships for NASA's completed Deep Impact and Stardust missions - which smacked one comet and returned samples from another to Earth, respectively - are being retargeted for new science through about 2011.

"These mission extensions are as exciting as it gets," said Alan Stern, NASA's associate administer for the agency's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. "They will allow us to revisit a comet for the first time, add another to the list of comets explored and make a search for small planets around stars with known large planets."

By using veteran spacecraft already in space, researchers can complete the experiments about 15 percent the cost of completely new missions, Stern said.