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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 ...
Watch live as a Nasa spacecraft returns to Earth with the largest asteroid sample in history on Sunday 24 September. After a seven-year, four-billion-mile journey across space, the ambitious NASA ...
Ceres (minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid , discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily , and announced as a new planet .
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.
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The location of 2024 YR4 qualifies it not just as any asteroid, but a near-Earth object (NEO). NEOs are defined as asteroids that hug the inner solar system, where we live, coming within 1.3 ...
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 Earth will be hit by a tiny asteroid today, astronomers have said. But the tiny asteroid – which is roughly one metre in size – will burn up in the atmosphere as it arrives.