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Dawn is a retired space probe that was launched by NASA in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. [1] In the fulfillment of that mission—the ninth in NASA's Discovery Program — Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey ...
The mountain was discovered on images taken by the Dawn spacecraft in orbit around Ceres in 2015. [6] It is estimated to have an average height of about 4 km (2.5 mi; 13,000 ft) and a maximum height of about 5 km (3.1 mi; 16,000 ft) on its steepest side; it is about 20 km (12 mi; 66,000 ft) wide at the base.
Ceres makes up 40% of the estimated (2394 ± 5) × 10 18 kg mass of the asteroid belt, and it has 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 times the mass of the next asteroid, Vesta, but it is only 1.3% the mass of the Moon. It is close to being in hydrostatic equilibrium , but some deviations from an equilibrium shape have yet to be explained. [ 64 ]
Dawn was launched in September 2007 with the mission of studying Ceres and the asteroid 4 Vesta. The spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey mission before leaving for Ceres in late 2012. It went into orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015.
The Ac-9 Occator quadrangle is located on an elevated equatorial region and is the brightest region of the dwarf planet Ceres. [16] Occator is the central feature of its eponymous quadrungle. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] The Ac-9 shows heavily fractured crater floors and is consistently shallow compared to similar size non-fractured crater floors.
The Dawn mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [101] Dawn is the first spacecraft to visit either Vesta or Ceres. It is also the first spacecraft to orbit two separate extraterrestrial bodies, using ion thrusters to travel between its targets.
Dawn 's images led to widespread reports in the media about the bright spots, including in news sources, [22] astronomy magazines, [23] and science magazines. [24] An informal NASA poll during May offered the following ideas for the nature of the spots: [ 25 ] ice, volcanos, geysers, salt deposits, rock, or other.
The Deep Space 1 and Dawn used the NSTAR, a solar-powered electrostatic ion propulsion engine. The NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) is a type of spacecraft ion thruster called electrostatic ion thruster. [1] [2] It is a highly efficient low-thrust spacecraft propulsion running on electrical power generated by solar arrays.