A Mars Odyssey

“Dawn has risen, and the spacecraft is healthy,” said the mission’s project manager Keyur Patel of JPL. “About this time tomorrow [Friday morning], we will have passed the moon’s orbit.”

At 7:34 a.m. this morning, the Delta 2 rocket lifted successfully from Florida, leaving behind not only the early soft morning shadows of Earth but also the launch complex 17B located at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. With the space shuttle, Dawn, fitted with nine of the strap–on solid-fuel boosters, Dawn Principal Investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California in Los Angeles is looking forward to learning about the solar system’s history from Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015. The signal that NASA was anxiously waiting for arrived at 9:44 a.m. EDT, which told them that Dawn had “achieved proper orientation in space and its massive solar array was generating power from the sun.”

In today’s times and with the latest high-tech instruments, NASA scientists are now more able to accurately formulate comparisons and contrasts from gathered data from the same set of instruments, but in two separate destinations. “Mucho grande” information will hopefully be gathered that has never been seen before or even heard of, with the next 80 days key testing and calibrating for the spacecraft systems in order to see if Dawn was ready to go for the long duration of the trip.

Visiting the heart of the asteroid belt, Dawn has approximately a 1.7 billion mile trip through the inner solar system to study the two asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. According to Christoper Russel, the space shuttle is planning on “probing deep into the asteroid belt,” which is what the space science community has been waiting for since interplanetary spaceflight became possible. The exploration of the two asteroids is important because they will be used as a comparison study, in order to contrast and compare their differences and similarities. The things that will be looked at will be elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, and tectonic history, in addition to water-bearing minerals. Science is also important with NASA observing the Dawn spacecraft and how it will orbit both Vesta and Ceres, measuring the celestial bodies’ masses and gravity fields.

As stated in earlier articles, but just as a tiny-weeny reminder, Dawn’s engines use a “unique, hyper-efficient system that is called the ion propulsion. This uses electricity in order to ionize xenon for the generation of rocket thrust. The high point of this is that the 12-inch ion thrusters have the ability to provide less power than conventional engines, but can maintain thrust for months at a time, according to NASA.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.