Ceres is seen from NASA's Dawn spacecraft on March 1, just a few days before the mission achieved orbit around the previously unexplored dwarf planet. The image was taken at a distance of about 30,000 miles (about 48,000 kilometers).
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
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NASA's Dawn
spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf
planet. The spacecraft was approximately 38,000 miles (61,000)
kilometers from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity
at about
4:39 a.m. PST (
7:39 a.m. EST)
Friday.
Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California received a signal from the spacecraft at
5:36 a.m. PST (
8:36 a.m. EST) that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned.
"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an
asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief
engineer and mission director at JPL. "Now, after a journey of 3.1
billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres,
home."
In addition to being the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet,
Dawn also has the distinction of being the first mission to orbit two
extraterrestrial targets. From 2011 to 2012, the spacecraft explored the
giant asteroid Vesta, delivering new insights and thousands of images
from that distant world. Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive
residents of our solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter.
The most recent images received from the spacecraft, taken on March 1
show Ceres as a crescent, mostly in shadow because the spacecraft's
trajectory put it on a side of Ceres that faces away from the sun until
mid-April. When Dawn emerges from Ceres' dark side, it will deliver
ever-sharper images as it spirals to lower orbits around the planet.
"We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of
the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
"We have much to do over the next year and a half, but we are now on
station with ample reserves, and a robust plan to obtain our science
objectives."
Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's
Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission
science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the
spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar
System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical
Institute are international partners on the mission team.
For a complete list of mission participants, visit:
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
mission