A briefing about NASA's Dawn and its historic impending arrival at the dwarf planet Ceres was held on Monday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Dawn will be the first spacecraft to successfully visit a dwarf planet upon its orbit insertion on Friday, March 6.
"Dawn is about to make history," said Robert Mase, project manager for the Dawn mission. "Our team is ready and eager to find out what Ceres has in store for us."
Images of Ceres show craters and strange bright spots. Ceres was the first object discovered in the Milky Way's asteroid belt, and the mission can tell us how it formed and if it is changing.
"Studying Ceres allows us to do historical research in space, opening a window into the earliest chapter in the history of our solar system," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science. "Data returned from Dawn could contribute significant breakthroughs in our understanding of how the solar system formed."
Dawn started final approach in December and has taken images for optical navigation. Dawn has made two rotation characterizations, allowing a view of Ceres through its full nine-hour rotation. The highest resolution images of Ceres have been captured by Dawn since Jan. 25 and will continue to improve as the spacecraft gets closer.
Before approaching Ceres, Dawn spent some time observing Vesta, an asteroid also in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. "Both Vesta and Ceres were on their way to becoming planets, but their development was interrupted by the gravity of Jupiter," said Carol Raymond, deputy project scientist at JPL. "These two bodies are like fossils from the dawn of the solar system, and they shed light on its origins."
"By studying Vesta and Ceres, we will gain a better understanding of the formation of our solar system, especially the terrestrial planets and most importantly the Earth," said Raymond. "These bodies are samples of the building blocks that have formed Venus, Earth and Mars. Vesta-like bodies are believed to have contributed heavily to the core of our planet, and Ceres-like bodies may have provided our water."
"We would not be able to orbit and explore these two worlds without ion propulsion," Mase said. "Dawn capitalizes on this innovative technology to deliver big science on a small budget."
In 2016, NASA will launch the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft. The mission will study a large asteroid and return samples to Earth. NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. monitors asteroids in order to understand them and protect the Earth from them. An Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is in the works.
