Showing posts with label Dawn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dawn. Show all posts

The von Kármán Lecture Series | Dawn’s Mission to the Asteroid Belt

Source: NASA youtube



A Theodore von Kármán Lecture Series talk, held December 4 and 5 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, addressed the ambitious and exciting mission of the Dawn spacecraft, one of NASA's most remarkable ventures into the solar system.

After more than seven years of interplanetary spaceflight, which included a spectacular exploration of the asteroid Vesta, the Dawn probe is just a few months away from the mysterious world, Ceres. Ceres and Vesta are two of the most massive residents of the main asteroid belt, that vast collection of bodies between Mars and Jupiter. Dr. Marc Rayman, Dawn Project Mission Director, is the featured speaker. -NASA

Hubble And Dawn Collaborate To See Ceres | Dec. 11, 2014

Source: Dawn Mission Education and Communications (E/C) youtube



Recorded - Dec 11, 2014 
As the Dawn Spacecraft approaches the dwarf planet Ceres in a matter of months, it's difficult to forget the amount of teamwork and collaboration that took place in order for amazing feats like this to be accomplished.

As of right now, the Hubble Space Telescope has the highest resolution image of Ceres, but that's all about to change as Dawn arrives and gives us all a completely new perspective of the largest object in the asteroid belt. In fact, the images taken by Hubble have been highly instrumental in the planning phases of getting Dawn to Ceres, as well as Vesta.

Join Tony Darnell, Dr. Carol Christian, and Scott Lewis, are on location at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Keri Bean as they discuss the long journey Dawn has made to get to Ceres. Joining them as well is Max Mutchler and Jianyang Li who worked on getting the gorgeous view from Hubble.




The Dawn spacecraft acquired this view as part of a calibration of its science camera. Ceres is the bright spot in the center of the image. A cropped, magnified view of Ceres appears in the inset image at lower left. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Carol Raymond | Vesta in the Light of Dawn, May 7, 2013

Source: airandspace.si.edu



In September 2012, the Dawn spacecraft completed its mission at Asteroid Vesta and began the journey to its next destination, the dwarf planet Ceres.  During its year at Vesta, Dawn revealed a complex world with huge impact basins, deep troughs, a geologically diverse surface and a layered interior.  An intact survivor from the beginning of the solar system, Vesta has much to tell us about the conditions in which our planetary neighborhood took shape. Join Carol Raymond on a tour of this ancient world and learn what it can tell us about the early days of the Solar System.

Carol Raymond is a Principal Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Deputy Principal Investigator for Dawn.    

The Exploring Space Lectures Series is made possible by the generous support of NASA, with additional support provided by Aerojet.

NASA's Dawn Prepares for Trek Toward Dwarf Planet, August 30, 2012

Source: solarsystem.nasa.gov

PASADENA, Calif. - 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 information about the Dawn mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.
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