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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 ...
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 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.
In 2022, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, whose sole goal was to fly 7 million miles to the 525-foot asteroid Dimorphos, and crash into it at 14,000 miles per ...
The asteroid Ceres, once thought to be just a large rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, has slushy volcanoes and liquid saltwater beneath its surface that may have formed an underground ocean ...
Asteroid 2024 YR4 has just above a 1% chance of crashing into Earth in ... This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Asteroid could hit Earth in 2032. NASA, other agencies, are preparing ...
Dawn took its first "close up" picture of Ceres in December 2014, and entered orbit in March 2015: First likely dwarf planet visited by a spacecraft, largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft 4 Vesta: 525.4: March 29, 1807: Dawn: 2011–2012: 210: 0.76: Dawn broke orbit on 5 September 2012 and headed to Ceres, where it arrived in March 2015
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. [26]