What NASA’s Dawn Saw on Ceres and Vesta Stunned Me

NASA’s dawn mission to explore Vesta and Ceres ended after a remarkable 11 years in space with no fuel to point its antenna at Earth. It left the protoplanet Vesta in 2012, reached the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015, and remained in orbit after a successful mission in 2018.

When Dawn entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta, it became the first spacecraft to circle an asteroid in the area where most of the Solar System’s asteroids are found, in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn is part of the NASA Discovery mission and was designed to orbit the asteroid Vesta, which is located between Jupiter and Mars. The Asteroid Belt Unmanned Probe is a mission designed to rendezvous with and orbit the asteroid Vesta, the largest asteroid. As with the asteroid Vesta, the unmanned asteroid belt probe entered a series of circumpolar circular orbits that will provide vantage points to study almost the entire surface of the dwarf planet.

Dawn was the first mission to explore the dwarf planet, reaching Ceres a few months before the New Horizons probe arrived at Pluto in July 2015. Dawn was also the first mission to visit a dwarf planet, several months ahead of New Horizons, which made a historic flyby of Pluto and Charon in July 2015.

Dawn is the first spacecraft to ever successfully fly around two extraterrestrial objects. Dawn will now permanently orbit Ceres, testifying to the pioneering spirit of space exploration.

Dawn was originally expected to leave Vesta on August 26, 2012 and begin its two-and-a-half-year journey to Ceres. Transit month. , arrived at Ceres on March 6, 2015. Dawn reached the large asteroid Vesta on July 16, 2011 and orbited Vesta until September 5, 2012, when it traveled to the dwarf planet Ceres.

After leaving the asteroid Vesta, Dawn traveled to the dwarf planet Ceres, becoming the first spacecraft to visit and orbit a dwarf planet and the first to orbit two alien targets. On her second flight, Don will travel to Ceres, where she will become the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet and orbit two alien objects. Engineers deorbited Dawn from the asteroid belt in 2012 and brought Dawn into the asteroid belt for more than two years before placing it in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, where it has been since 2015 Data collection.

In 2011, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took the 600-kilometer egg-shaped Vesta into orbit for a year before heading to Ceres, arriving in 2015. solar system. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft proved that the protoplanet Vesta was indeed the source of HED meteorites and had enough internal heat to differentiate (separate) into a crust-mantle-core structure, just like Earth.

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