Dawn Will Enter Orbit Around Vesta Today

NASA mission controllers are excited about the fact that the Dawn spacecraft is finally about to enter orbit around the large asteroid Vesta today, July 15. The maneuver is expected to take place at around 10 pm PDT (01:00 am EDT, 0600 GMT Saturday, July 16).

After the spacecraft is captured in orbit around the asteroid, it will spend the next few hours bringing all of its systems online, and preparing to communicate with its mission managers. First contact will be made during a press conference to be held at 11:30 pm PDT on Saturday, July 16.

Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for a full year. During this time, it will establish if the object is a protoplanet and, if so, the factors that prevented it from developing into a rocky planet. The probe will also look for moons around this asteroid.

Another objective is to analyze the space rock's interior, and to determine whether it indeed contains a nucleus, mantle and crust, as some researches have suggested. The work is expected to provide experts with a clearer understanding of how planets form.

At the same time, the mission will allow us to gain a more detailed view of the early solar system. Vesta stopped from growing during a stage of development that has only been analyzed in theory.

The object shares the Inner Asteroid Belt (IAB) – between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – with thousands of asteroids and meteorites, but also with the dwarf planet Ceres. The latter is also a target for Dawn, when it finally departs from Vesta in 2012.

The image attached to this article is one of the latest the space probe collected. The photo was snapped from a distance of 26,000 miles (41,000 kilometers), and it reveals interesting surface details on the asteroid, including craters and peaks.

Dawn will orbit about 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) away from Vesta's surface, though it will later move in a closer orbit. When the two meet, later today, they will be flying about 117 million miles (188 million kilometers) away from our planet.

“It has taken nearly four years to get to this point. Our latest tests and check-outs show that Dawn is right on target and performing normally,” says Dawn project manager Robert Mase, from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.

The mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the JPL for the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD), in Washington DC. Dawn is a project of the SMD Discovery Program, which is in turn managed by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.