• Tag Archives Ceres

  • Mystery Spot on Dwarf Planet Ceres Has Mysterious Partner

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The intrigue surrounding Ceres continues to deepen as a NASA probe gets closer to the dwarf planet.

    The new photos of Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which is scheduled to arrive in orbit around Ceres on the night of March 5, reveal that a puzzling bright spot on the dwarf planet’s surface has a buddy of sorts.

    “Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin,” Dawn principal investigator Chris Russell, of UCLA, said in a statement. “This may be pointing to a volcanolike origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations.”

    Dawn took the new images on Feb. 19, when it was about 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers) from Ceres — still too far away to give scientists a good look at the peculiar spots.

    “The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size, it is brighter than anything else on Ceres,” Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, said in the same statement. “This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us.”

    Dawn will begin investigating the many mysteries of Ceres — the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — in earnest soon enough. After reaching Ceres’ orbit next week, the probe will spend about six weeks working down to its first science orbit, getting there on April 23.

    Dawn will then study Ceres from a series of orbits until June 2016, when the $466 million mission will end.

    Dawn launched in September 2007 to study the asteroid belt’s two largest denizens, the 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres, and Vesta, a protoplanet about 330 miles (530 km) in diameter. Dawn’s observations of these planetary building blocks should reveal key insights about the solar system’s early days and the planet formation process, mission team members say.

    The spacecraft orbited Vesta from July 2011 until September 2012, when it began the trek to Ceres. When Dawn gets there, it will become the first probe ever to orbit two different bodies beyond the Earth-moon system.

    Full article: http://www.space.com … ht-spots-photos.html


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  • NASA’s Dawn Prepares for Trek Toward Dwarf Planet

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is on track to become the first probe to orbit and study two distant solar system destinations, to help scientists answer questions about the formation of our solar system. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the giant asteroid Vesta on Sept. 4 PDT (Sept. 5 EDT) to start its two-and-a-half-year journey to the dwarf planet Ceres.

    Dawn began its 3-billion-mile (5-billion kilometer) odyssey to explore the two most massive objects in the main asteroid belt in 2007. Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011 and will reach Ceres in early 2015. Dawn’s targets represent two icons of the asteroid belt that have been witness to much of our solar system’s history.

    To make its escape from Vesta, the spacecraft will spiral away as gently as it arrived, using a special, hyper-efficient system called ion propulsion. Dawn’s ion propulsion system uses electricity to ionize xenon to generate thrust. The 12-inch-wide ion thrusters provide less power than conventional engines, but can maintain thrust for months at a time.

    “Thrust is engaged, and we are now climbing away from Vesta atop a blue-green pillar of xenon ions,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We are feeling somewhat wistful about concluding a fantastically productive and exciting exploration of Vesta, but now have our sights set on dwarf planet Ceres.

    Dawn’s orbit provided close-up views of Vesta, revealing unprecedented detail about the giant asteroid. The mission revealed that Vesta completely melted in the past, forming a layered body with an iron core. The spacecraft also revealed the scarring from titanic collisions Vesta suffered in its southern hemisphere, surviving not one but two colossal impacts in the last two billion years. Without Dawn, scientists would not have known about the dramatic troughs sculpted around Vesta, which are ripples from the two south polar impacts.

    “We went to Vesta to fill in the blanks of our knowledge about the early history of our solar system,” said Christopher Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator, based at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). “Dawn has filled in those pages, and more, revealing to us how special Vesta is as a survivor from the earliest days of the solar system. We can now say with certainty that Vesta resembles a small planet more closely than a typical asteroid.”

    The mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

    UCLA is responsible for the overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are part of the mission’s team. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

    For more information about Dawn, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

    Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
    jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

    Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
    NASA Headquarters, Washington
    dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov 2012-271

    http://www.nasa.gov/ … ws/dawn20120830.html


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