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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Becomes First To Orbit a Dwarf Planet
The Grim Reefer writes with news that at 7:39 AM EST (12:39 UTC) today, NASA's Dawn spacecraft was captured by the gravity of dwarf planet Ceres.
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.
Further details available from the Planetary Society.
This is the dawn of a new era in space exploration.
Table-ized A.I.
The processing and removal of the larger and slightly smaller brightly lit pyramids will take time.
My understanding is that the ion engine acts quite slowly. It seems that the "news" of an orbit failure would be a matter of not being where it's expected to be, and there should be a period of uncertainty when the "error" is within expected measurement noise range such that "orbit failure" would be a slowly increasing probability value instead of a one-time confirmation. I don't get the "news point" thing of today.
Table-ized A.I.
I believe the preferred term is "Little Person Planet"
Ceres gravity is 0.27 m/s2 (Earth's is 9.8, Luna is a hefty 1.6)
So 'going into orbit' of something so vanishingly weak is really an amazing accomplishment, discussed in their blog at http://www.planetary.org/blogs....
(Amusing point of reference, with 3 ion engines, Dawn's 0-60 speed is 11 days. Take that, Jeremy Clarkson!)
Congrats all.
-Styopa
"Has to have cleared orbit". Even if Earth or any other rocky planet put where Ceres or Pluto was, they couldn't clear that orbit.
They're planets. "Dwarf planet" is an invention of morons, 95 percent of the astronomers in the IAU didn't vote on it because of when the vote was done.
Quoting from the Planetary.org article: "While there are countless questions about Ceres, the most popular now seems to be what the bright spots are. It is impossible not to be mesmerized by what appear to be reatlowing beacons, shining out across the cosmic seas from the uncharted lands ahead." "reatlowing" doesn't appear to be a real word, and I can't figure out what was meant. Any ideas?
Didn't it previously orbit Vesta?
The Big Astronomy does not want you to know, that big planets are getting bigger, while the small ones are getting smaller.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The approach trajectory was particularly cunning considering that there was an outage of Dawn's ion thruster.
an ill wind that blows no good
I posted a comment on the blog about it, and the author said he wrote "glowing" but somehow it got mangled. Fixed now.
Why the news black out for a month? All of a sudden the cameras won't work until nearly the end of April? Explanation? BUELLER? BUELLER? BS?
This was the time it spent transitioning from orbit at Vesta to orbit at Ceres. There was obviously not much to see during this time except for the tantalizingly increasing resolution of Ceres. People began to take notice when the two bright spots came into view.