Category Archives: Dawn

ceres, Dawn, New Horizons mission, planetary science

NASA: The Continuing Solar System Missions

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Beyond Pluto, Orbiting Ceres, and Circling Mars and the Moon

Where Pluto is -- roughly at the position of Pluto, and headed for PT1 (2014 MU69). Courtesy New Horizons.
Where Pluto is — roughly at the position of Pluto, and headed for PT1 (2014 MU69). Courtesy New Horizons.

Well, it’s official: New Horizons has the official go-ahead for an extended mission to the object 2014 MU69 that lies along its current path out through the Kuiper Belt. Mind you, the spacecraft was going to head that way anyhow, but now the team can plan for further course correction maneuvers and mission activities as the spacecraft whizzes past this object. That’s great news for the New Horizons team. It’s also a boost for planetary scientists interested in learning more about the objects that populate the Kuiper Belt.

Haulani Crater on Ceres
Ceres’s Haulani Crater, with a diameter of 21 miles (34 kilometers), shows evidence of landslides from its crater rim.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The Dawn mission will continue its mission around Ceres, mapping the surface of this weird little place. In particular, it will monitor any changes as Ceres gets closest to the Sun during its upcoming perihelion passage. It will be interesting to see if the activities that formed those weird deposits on the surface will become more frequent. They do tell us that something is going on under the Cerean surface!

An artist's conception of the MAVEN mission in orbit around Mars. Courtesy NASA/GSFC.
An artist’s conception of the MAVEN mission in orbit around Mars. Courtesy NASA/GSFC.

NASA announced the Dawn mission extension, along with continued funding for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission that’s currently studying the Martian atmosphere, the Opportunity and Curiosity Mars rovers, the Mars Odyssey orbiter, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) at the Moon, and NASA’s part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission. These are all very worthy exploration activities and extend our eyes and ears out to the planets in imaginative and impressive ways.

All in all, the fact that NASA can continue to support a wide range of planetary exploration missions is a good thing. I wish they could spend MORE money on studies of the planets so that we can get a few more missions going, but this is at least a good sign.

Exploring the Solar System

Understanding the planets and other worlds of the solar system is like studying your neighborhood. Sure, you can stay in your house and watch TV or surf the Web, but knowing your neighbors and the houses they live in is important, too. The ongoing study of solar system objects tell is just starting to help us understand the origin and evolution of the planets, dwarf planets, satellites and more. And, the more we learn about “out there”, the better it helps us understand the home planet.

I am sure that future Mars explorers will be grateful for the work we’re doing now to learn about the Red Planet. In my dreams, I see future Pluto explorers doing the same thing, maybe from the deck of a New Horizons station circling that distant planet. Maybe they’ll be sending their own missions to MU69 or other Kuiper Belt Objects in that far distant future. In that dream, they all started on the Moon, learning how to live and work in space and on other worlds. It’s not so far-fetched. Maybe it’ll be our kids and grandkids who do those missions, based on the work we all did and paid for in this time.

Anyway, we can dream. In the meantime, congratulations to the missions with newly extended budgets — I’m sure the teams are ecstatic that they can continue the work they began.

 

asteroid, astronomy news, Dawn, NASA, planetary science

Dawn at the Asteroid: The Approach

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Vesta Comes into View

A still from a short movie taken as the spacecraft Dawn gets closer to asteroid Vesta. Courtesy NASA/JPL_Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Well, this may not look like much, but it’s a big deal in the asteroid-study game. It’s an image of asteroid Vesta, taken with the Dawn spacecraft. If you visit the the mission’s web pages at NASA, you can watch a multi-still “movie” made from frames taken by the spacecraft’s framing cameras on June 1.  The video presents 20 frames, looped five times, that span a 30-minute period. During that time, Vesta rotates about 30 degrees. The images included here are used by navigators to fine-tune Dawn’s trajectory during its approach to Vesta, with arrival expected on July 16, 2011.

Why a mission to Vesta?   It is the only large asteroid with a basaltic surface that formed due to volcanic processes early in the solar system’s history. Asteroids, like comets, are treasure troves of information about what was going 0n in the infant solar system — some 4.5 billion years ago. Here’s how that works. During the earliest history of our solar system, the elements, minerals, and chemical compounds in the solar nebula were distributed throughout the nebula, with their exact locations varying due with their distance from the Sun (and its heat). As distance from the Sun increases, the temperature drops. The young Sun, hot and active, drove away or consumed gases and icy bodies, leaving behind rocky materials to form the inner (so-called “terrestrial” bodies) close by. The icy worlds and gas giants formed farther away.

So, the division of the solar system into terrestrial and gas/ice giant worlds is a large-scale division.  Our planets have changed over time, particularly the Earth, with its atmospheric change, its geological change, and the evolution of life (which has affected conditions on the planet as well). To learn more about the “pure” or what planetary scientists call, the “pristine” materials that made up the big parts of the solar system, we need to look at the smaller-scale objects: asteroids and comets. Studying asteroids (and comets) and studying their compositions are a way of peering into the distant past and learning what it was like, sort of like looking at your baby pictures and seeing what you were then and comparing it to what you are now.

You probably didn’t know this, but Vesta is considered a protoplanet because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.  It is 330 miles (530 kilometers) across, and is the second most massive object in the Asteroid Belt — that region of space between Mars and Jupiter that is populated with asteroids.  In a few days, we’ll have even better images of this distant “almost-a-planet” world, so keep your eyes peeled for more news.

Speaking of news, this week’s Carnival of Space is up, posted over at John Williams’s Starry Critters web site. Check it out for some unique looks at places and spaces throughout the cosmos.