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At 1 A.M. Eastern time on July 16, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will become the first man-made probe to enter orbit around a so-called main-belt asteroid. The spherical body, Vesta, circles the sun in a stretch of asteroids known as the Asteroid Belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
As Dawn approaches Vesta, it is taking detailed photographs, such as the July 9 image shown here at a distance of about 42,000 kilometers with a resolution of 3.8 kilometers per pixel. Vesta is large for an asteroid, leading to its classification as a "protoplanet," a celestial body that, it is thought, could have developed into a planet.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., supervises the Dawn mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in September 2007 and flrst flew by Mars for a gravity boost.
After circling Vesta for about a year, Dawn will depart for Ceres, which is larger than Vesta, and the only dwarf planet in the Asteroid Belt; it will enter orbit there in 2015.
—Sophie Bushwick
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5 Comments
Add CommentUnlike this report, I hope those controlling Dawn's orbital approach realize that Vesta is something less than a perfectly spherically symmetrically distribution of mass - otherwise they might miss the point-mass!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould be fascinating for Dawn to bump Vesta ever so slightly, altering her orbit into a direct contact with Chicago!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeither is the Earth, Jupiter, or Saturn; but unless they forgot to convert from feet to meters, I imagine they have things under control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt all depends on how close you're getting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm really not so concerned about Dawn's controllers as the accuracy of this report...
What part of this report are you questioning? Am I missing something? I read no fact in this report which is up for dispute. Perhaps a discussion about asteroid verses proto-planet?
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