Dawn spacecraft arrives at Pad-17B of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Credit: NASA/Jack Pfaller

On 11 September 2007, NASA's Dawn spacecraft arrived at Launch Pad-17B of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The launch period for the 8-year mission will be on 26 September. Dawn will traverse over 5 billion km into the asteroid belt.

"From here, the only way to go is up," said Keyur Patel, Dawn Project Manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "We are looking forward to putting some space between Dawn and Mother Earth and making some space history."

Dawn's ultimate goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the Solar System's earliest epoch 4.5 billion years ago by studying the large asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. They orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.

It is believed that they were potential planets that failed to reach planetary status. However, Ceres and Vesta each followed a very different evolutionary track during the Solar System's first few million years.

By investigating Vesta and Ceres during the 8-year spaceflight, the Dawn mission aims to find new clues to some of the mysteries of planetary formation. Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit an object in the asteroid belt and the first to orbit two bodies in a single mission. Recent images obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) inspired further intriguing questions about the evolution of these asteroids.

Dawn will be launched aboard the Delta II 7925-H rocket, a modified version of the  heavy launch vehicle Delta II. The launch window closes on 15 October.

Further Reading

Dawn
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov
NASA
www.nasa.gov/

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist