
Dawn spacecraft approaches protoplanet Vesta - zoowar
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-dawn-spacecraft-approaches-protoplanet-vesta.html
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bh42222
Non physorg.com links:

<http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/>

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110504103742.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110504103742.htm)

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dhughes
Thank you.

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vbtemp
Among the fleet of current interplanetary spacecraft, I think Dawn is perhaps
the most interesting. It will be the first spacecraft to enter orbit around a
planet(oid) and then fly to a second one to enter orbit there. I just can't
wait to see how it turns out.

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psycovic23
Let's not forget Deep Impact. Flew past two asteroids, and even threw
something into the first one while taking pictures (with an incredible
autonavigation system). Pretty awesome if you ask me.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)>

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vbtemp
That was pretty novel, but I still think Dawn is one of the most interesting
still because of the ion thruster and re-orbit of ceres. The neat thing about
DI (now called Epoxi and run by UMD, btw) is that it's now become a sort of
flying testbed for all sorts of experimental flight and communication
software. See "DINET"

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InclinedPlane
Pretty exciting considering how far we've advanced. In the 1960s (an era when
humans walked on the moon, even) we could do little better than send probes on
flybys of planets and return a handful of low res photos and other data. The
Mariner 4 mission to Mars returned less than 700 kilobytes worth of data, and
left us with the impression that Mars was very much more like our Moon than
anything else, it took many later missions for our more modern understanding
of Mars to firm up. In contrast, Dawn uses ion engines to rendezvous with not
one but two asteroids, and will study them with an impressive suite of
instruments including an incredibly advanced imaging spectrometer. Each image
that Dawn takes will return orders of magnitude more useful scientific data
than the entire Mariner 4 mission. Meanwhile, there are other missions such as
the Mars Science Laboratory, WMAP and Planck, JWST, JUNO, which are equally as
astounding as measures of how far we've advanced in just a few decades.

