15 July 2011
Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta today!
Posted by Ryan Anderson
I have been a delinquent blogger lately, but I had to break my silence briefly to give you a heads up: today NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will make history by being the first probe to orbit the protoplanet Vesta! The image below is from July 9, and already Dawn has upgraded Vesta from a fuzzy disk in Hubble images to a world with visible surface features, including some strange striations. Once Dawn is in orbit, we should be getting even better views. Stay tuned!
Once Dawn is finished with Vesta, it will move on and go into orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, making it the first mission to orbit a dwarf planet and the first mission to orbit two different objects*!
*Yes, many missions have orbited the earth first before going elsewhere, but I don’t count that as the same thing, because they started quite firmly in the earth’s gravity well.
*Ahem*. Apollo, several missions. Early stuff, too.
Though maybe the Earth-Moon system bodies doesn’t count as “different” after their initial ~ 50 My as one body…
Dang it, I was *this* close to adding the caveat that earth doesn’t count. But I thought, “No, Ryan, don’t be pedantic.”
Lesson learned. 🙂
Am I the only one who found this to be a bit of a strange read:
expect, expect, estimate, approximately…
Yep I get it, it’s not exact! Makes it sound a little pessimistic =(
“Engineers expect the spacecraft to be captured into orbit at approximately 10 p.m. PDT Friday, July 15. They expect to hear from the spacecraft and confirm that it performed as planned during a scheduled communications pass that starts at approximately 11:30 p.m. PDT on Saturday, July 16. When Vesta captures Dawn into its orbit, engineers estimate there will be approximately 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) between them. At that point, the spacecraft and asteroid will be approximately 117 million miles (188 million kilometers) from Earth.”
This is probably a mix of NASA’s fear of getting the public’s hopes up mixed with a PR person adapting an engineer’s explanation of what will happen. In any case, it doesn’t matter now. Dawn is in orbit!