Dawn spacecraft lifts off:

[Praxius]

Dawn spacecraft lifts off

NASA's spacecraft Dawn launched shortly after the sun rose on Thursday, beginning its eight-year journey across 6.4 billion kilometres in space. The spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 7:34 ET. "If you live in the Bahamas this is one time you can tell your neighbour, with a straight face, that Dawn will rise in the west," project manager Keyur Patel of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory California said shortly before the launch. NASA said the mission will study two asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, which formed 4.5 billion years ago in the same environment as the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Yet the asteroids — sometimes called minor planets — never developed. Dawn is the first spacecraft to be able to orbit around more than one target, thanks to innovative ion-propulsion engines that can be stopped and restarted during flight using a fraction of the fuel of conventional chemical thrusters, reports Reuters. Scientists working on the project say that by using the same set of instruments at two separate destinations, they will be able to more accurately compare the two asteroids. Dawn's science instruments will measure mass, shape, surface topography and tectonic history, elemental and mineral composition, as well as seek out water-bearing minerals. In addition, the Dawn spacecraft itself and the way it orbits both Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the celestial bodies' gravity fields. NASA predicts the spacecraft will reach Vesta in August 2011, and it will stay there for about nine months. It will leave in May 2012 for a nearly three-year trip to Ceres. Both minor planets are in the solar system's asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. "Visiting both Vesta and Ceres enables a study in extraterrestrial contrasts," principal investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California said in a release. "One is rocky and is representative of the building blocks that constructed the planets of the inner solar system. The other may very well be icy and represents the outer planets. Yet, these two very diverse bodies reside in essentially the same neighborhood. It is one of the mysteries Dawn hopes to solve." Dawn contains a computer chip about the size of a nickel with the names of more than 360,000 space enthusiasts from around the world who signed up to join a virtual voyage to the asteroid belt.

Some food for thought.

[5010]

Very cool. I hope they someday send a probe that can land on asteroids, rove around, dig and scrape samples, etc like the mars rovers. Then jump like a grasshopper away and turn on the ion drive to visit the next one.

I wonder why they don't do that now. Maybe they don't want to disturb the pristine surface just yet.

[Praxius]

Quote by: 5010 Very cool. I hope they someday send a probe that can land on asteroids, rove around, dig and scrape samples, etc like the mars rovers. Then jump like a grasshopper away and turn on the ion drive to visit the next one. I wonder why they don't do that now. Maybe they don't want to disturb the pristine surface just yet.

lol... we have to finish raping this planet before we start raping other planets and astroids

[Thanatos]

Quote by: 5010 Very cool. I hope they someday send a probe that can land on asteroids, rove around, dig and scrape samples, etc like the mars rovers. Then jump like a grasshopper away and turn on the ion drive to visit the next one. I wonder why they don't do that now. Maybe they don't want to disturb the pristine surface just yet.

Hayabusa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Japanese are half a step ahead of us. I say half a step because a computer glitch and a fuel leak nearly killed their asteroid-sampling probe, and its not clear if it scooped up anything or not. We'll find out when it gets back in 2010.