14 DAY TRIAL // Just hours ago, NASA's Dawn spacecraft officially became the first probe ever to place itself in the orbit of a dwarf planet and begin circling it.
Thus, it was at 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) that the spacecraft was caught by the gravitational pull of Ceres, a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
Mission scientists with NASA say that, at the time when it was captured by the dwarf planet's gravity, the Dawn spacecraft found itself at a distance of about 38,000 miles (61,000 kilometers) from the celestial body.
Shortly after, at 5:36 a.m. PST (8:36 a.m. EST), researchers received the signal confirming that the probe had successfully placed itself in Ceres' orbit and that all was well.
“We feel exhilarated,” Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles in the US, said in a statement.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft left Earth in September 2007, when it was launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. To reach Ceres, it traveled over 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers).
Now that it finds itself in the dwarf planet's orbit, the probe will get to work snapping images of the celestial body's surface and trying to get a better understanding of its makeup.