NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Becomes First To Orbit a Dwarf Planet 49
The Grim Reefer writes with news that at 7:39 AM EST (12:39 UTC) today, NASA's Dawn spacecraft was captured by the gravity of dwarf planet Ceres.
Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California received a signal from the spacecraft at 5:36 a.m. PST (8:36 a.m. EST) that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned. "Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL. "Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres home." In addition to being the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, Dawn also has the distinction of being the first mission to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. From 2011 to 2012, the spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta, delivering new insights and thousands of images from that distant world. Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive residents of our solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Further details available from the Planetary Society.
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Didn't it previously orbit Vesta?
Re: Not the first to post (Score:1)
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This was the time it spent transitioning from orbit at Vesta to orbit at Ceres. There was obviously not much to see during this time except for the tantalizingly increasing resolution of Ceres. People began to take notice when the two bright spots came into view.
Can't...resist...pun (Score:3, Funny)
This is the dawn of a new era in space exploration.
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You can't be cereous, are you?
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don't make me kick your as-teroid.
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Your UID is too high to remember him, but this would have been a perfect response for the "IF I EVER MEET YOU I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy.
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don't make me kick your as-teroid.
Do you mean ass toroid -- a toilet seat?
No pictures yet (Score:3, Funny)
Re: No pictures yet (Score:1)
Slow boo boo versus fast boo boo (Score:1)
My understanding is that the ion engine acts quite slowly. It seems that the "news" of an orbit failure would be a matter of not being where it's expected to be, and there should be a period of uncertainty when the "error" is within expected measurement noise range such that "orbit failure" would be a slowly increasing probability value instead of a one-time confirmation. I don't get the "news point" thing of today.
I believe the preferred term (Score:5, Funny)
I believe the preferred term is "Little Person Planet"
Re:I believe the preferred term (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I believe the preferred term (Score:4, Funny)
I believe they prefer the term "Gravitationally Challenged"
Pretty amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Ceres gravity is 0.27 m/s2 (Earth's is 9.8, Luna is a hefty 1.6)
So 'going into orbit' of something so vanishingly weak is really an amazing accomplishment, discussed in their blog at http://www.planetary.org/blogs... [planetary.org].
(Amusing point of reference, with 3 ion engines, Dawn's 0-60 speed is 11 days. Take that, Jeremy Clarkson!)
Congrats all.
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> Ceres gravity is 0.27 m/s2 (Earth's is 9.8, Luna is a hefty 1.6)
Hold your finger out in front of you. Over 1 second accelerate it to
end up 27 cm below where it started. It's still a reasonably attractive
force.
Re:Pretty amazing (Score:4, Informative)
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right.
on cerces square roots you too.
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Just FYI I think it's an asshole American who responds to China's landing a rover on the moon with "so what, we were there already, nyah, nyah"
Your response, and my reaction to you: pretty much the same in both ways.
dwarf planet definition is bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
"Has to have cleared orbit". Even if Earth or any other rocky planet put where Ceres or Pluto was, they couldn't clear that orbit.
They're planets. "Dwarf planet" is an invention of morons, 95 percent of the astronomers in the IAU didn't vote on it because of when the vote was done.
We demand equal gravity for all planets! (Score:1)
The Big Astronomy [thepeoplescube.com] does not want you to know, that big planets are getting bigger, while the small ones are getting smaller [thepeoplescube.com].
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"Has to have cleared orbit". Even if Earth or any other rocky planet put where Ceres or Pluto was, they couldn't clear that orbit.
Okay? So then Earth would be a dwarf planet if it were where Pluto is. And if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. So what? All categories are just words we make up to group things. We either had to put Pluto in the "not a planet" group, or expand the "planet group" to cover many, many more objects.
I think you're just angry that something you learned as a child has changed.
Re:dwarf planet definition is bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense, I'd have no problem with 14 planets now rather than the 9 there were defined when I was a child.
We expand the list of discovered planets, with a sane definition of "planet". That's the proper thing to do.
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sane definition of "planet"
Care to elaborate?
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Yes, removing that silly rule I mentioned in this thread's first post
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So then the solar system has lots of planets. No problem. Are you worried we'll run out of names? We will not.
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If you want to call it a planet, nobody's stopping you. Myself, I think it's wrong to call one fruit an "orange" after its color, but call another fruit "banana", which has nothing to do with the color. So, therefore I always refer to it as a "yellow". The word "banana" is an invention of morons.
"reatlowing beacons"??? (Score:3)
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It's "Great Glowing", where some miscreant has purloined the G's.
Re:"reatlowing beacons"??? - "glowing beacons" (Score:2)
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Chance collisions with debris have eroded the camouflage covering, exposing the battle steel underneath.
Approach trajectory (Score:1)