Dawn Will Arrive at Vesta Next Week

In less than 10 days, the NASA Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around Vesta, the largest asteroid in our solar system. The probe has been traveling towards the giant space rock since 2007.

A few weeks ago, the spacecraft saw Vesta for the first time. Images of the object were snapped using the navigations cameras on the vehicle, in order to make the necessary flight trajectory corrections.

At first, the asteroid looked like a small, bright dot on the photos but, as the days passed, it began to grow until certain features on its surface became visible. NASA experts say that the object is about the size of the state of Arizona.

They estimate that Dawn will be captured in orbit around Vesta on July 16, where it will begin the second leg of its mission. The probe will remain here for about a year, before beginning the trip to the dwarf planet Ceres.

Both Vesta and Ceres are located in the Inner Asteroid Belt, which can be found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The 330-mile (530-kilometer) wide asteroid captured the imagination of astronomers because it may very well be a protoplanet.

Studies have thus far revealed that Vesta may have a core, mantle and crust, just like the rocky planets of the inner solar system do. Its development may have been halted by some mysterious mechanism just a few million years after the Sun formed.

“Bodies like Vesta are building blocks. So we're going back and doing some sort of investigation into our roots, the roots of the solar system,” explained University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) expert Christopher Russell, the principal investigator of the mission.

After traveling more than 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometers), Dawn was some 53,400 miles (86,000 kilometers) away from Vesta last Friday, on July 1. The orbiter will be about 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) away from the surface of the asteroid when it will be captured by its gravity.

After orbital insertion is verified and confirmed, experts will begin to bring the spacecraft's scientific instruments online. Mission controllers expect to have the entire suite fully operational by early August.

“As we explore Vesta, we take a virtual journey back in time to the beginning of the solar system,” revealed Dawn deputy principal investigator Carol Raymond. She is based at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.

During its stay around the asteroid, the orbiter will move between several orbits, ranging in altitude from 2,700 to 200 kilometers (1,700 to 120 miles) above Vesta's surface, Space reports.

“The Dawn mission is unique in that we're going to be the first mission to rendezvous with not just one body, but two solar system bodies. These are two of the last unexplored worlds in our inner solar system,” concludes JPL Dawn project manager Robert Mase.