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ESA / NASA

An artist's conception show's a close-up look at NASA's comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft.

NASA's veteran Deep Impact spacecraft has chased its last comet.

The space agency declared Deep Impact dead Friday, six weeks after the last communication from the probe, which slammed an impactor into one comet and successfully flew by another icy wanderer during its long and productive life.

"Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned," Deep Impact principal investigator Mike A'Hearn of the University of Maryland said in a statement. "It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity." [Best Close Encounters of the Comet Kind]

Deep Impact launched in January 2005 on a mission to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1. In July of that year, the spacecraft crashed an impactor into Tempel 1, allowing scientists to study the icy body's composition.

Deep Impact then flew by Comet Hartley 2 in November 2010, as part of a broad extended mission dubbed EPOXI (a combination of "Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization" and "Deep Impact Extended Investigation").

The spacecraft also observed Comet Garradd from afar from February to April 2012, then snapped its first photos of the potentially dazzling Comet ISON in January of this year. In addition, Deep Impact captured images of Earth, Mars and the moon and studied six separate stars to confirm the motions of their orbiting planets, NASA officials said.

Over the course of its operational life, the spacecraft beamed home about 500,000 images and traveled 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion kilometers) through deep space.

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NASA's comet-hunting Deep Impact spacecraft declared dead