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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Becomes First To Orbit a Dwarf Planet

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-working-on-orbiting-an-elf-planet dept.

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.

8 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Can't...resist...pun by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is the dawn of a new era in space exploration.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  2. No pictures yet by mike2006 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The processing and removal of the larger and slightly smaller brightly lit pyramids will take time.

  3. I believe the preferred term by xevioso · · Score: 4, Funny

    I believe the preferred term is "Little Person Planet"

    1. Re:I believe the preferred term by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 3, Funny

      So when does the satellite toss it?

    2. Re:I believe the preferred term by sconeu · · Score: 3, Funny

      I believe they prefer the term "Gravitationally Challenged"

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  4. Pretty amazing by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Pretty amazing by tompaulco · · Score: 3, Informative

      On the other hand, on Earth, by the time you have fallen for two seconds, you are traveling almost 20 meters per second, and you are probably going to die on impact. On Ceres, you can fall for over 70 seconds and over 700 feet and not reach the same velocity.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
  5. Re:dwarf planet definition is bullshit by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nonsense, I'd have no problem with 14 planets now rather than the 9 there were defined when I was a child.

    We expand the list of discovered planets, with a sane definition of "planet". That's the proper thing to do.