After 11 years of gathering breathtaking imagery, and performing unprecedented feats of spacecraft engineering, Dawn -- NASA's space probe for the asteroid belt -- is drawing to a close due to lack of a key fuel, the US space agency said.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in September 2007, Dawn was majorly tasked to study two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt Vesta and Ceres, which when combined, make up 45 per cent of the mass of the main asteroid belt.