NASA’s spacecraft named ‘Dawn’ has been hurtling through space for several years now after being launched in September of 2007. It is en-route to a Asteroid named ‘Vesta,’ and is poised to be within orbit of the celestial rock within a matter of hours between now to tomorrow on Friday. Vesta is positioned between Mars and Jupiter in the ‘asteroid belt.’
This belt of asteroids range from tiny fragments to dwarf-planet sized ones such as Vesta are usually regarded by scientists as the remnants of a planet that never formed.
NASA plans to study Vesta with the sophisticated equipment on-board Vesta for a total of one year before they plan to remove the spacecraft from the confines of Vesta’s gravity well and set it on course to another celestial body, to a dwarf-planet named Ceres in July of 2012. NASA notes that Dawn will be the first spacecraft to enter two separate orbits around different planetary bodies.
The Dawn spacecraft is managed by the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) and their project manager, Robert Mase, stated “It has taken nearly four years to get to this point. Our latest tests and check-outs show that Dawn is right on target and performing normally.”
By the time Dawn steers into Vesta’s orbit it is estimated it will be a distance of 9,900 miles between the spacecraft and the asteroid. Both of them at that point together will be 117 million miles from Earth. The JPL team and collaborating scientists will have to adjust Dawn’s orbit as general approximations have been made to this point in getting the probe to Vesta.
Image Source: NASA