
Nasa's Dawn probe achieves orbit around Ceres - S4M
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/nasa-probe-finally-arrives-icy-alien-world/
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ChuckMcM
And now we might get to figure out those bright spots :-) I look forward to
the day when someone could take their space tug, fuel up at depot at the
Earth-Moon L2 point, then plot an intercept trajectory to the asteroid belt
station.

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grecy
I saw it launch - it was supremely impressive.

[http://theroadchoseme.com/dawn-launch-cape-canaveral-
florida](http://theroadchoseme.com/dawn-launch-cape-canaveral-florida)

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drzaiusapelord
There's something so slow and then tremendously fast about space exploration.
Your blog post was a little bit over seven years ago. It must be nerve-
wracking to be on the engineering team for these projects. You spend years
building the craft then there's this long wait until it gets near the
destination. Now the world is all of a sudden watching you. A failure might be
a career or reputation killer as well, and for nothing you did wrong or could
avoid.

This makes me think about the failure of the Beagle 2. Colin Pillinger's star
faded pretty quickly after that. Turns out it landed during a dust storm which
thinned the atmosphere which meant parachutes were deployed too late (deployed
by barometric pressure?). Its remains on Mars show that its solar panels still
folded. Its assumed it hit the surface so hard that the motors needed to open
them failed to operate.

I believe the cost was pretty close to 100m USD. Not super expensive, but
certainly not cheap, especially for the ESA.

And the waiting game continues:

> [Dawn] won’t be sending back any pictures or data until late April

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chriskanan
This article has more details: [http://www.wired.com/2015/03/nasa-probe-
finally-arrives-icy-...](http://www.wired.com/2015/03/nasa-probe-finally-
arrives-icy-alien-world/)

The most interesting bit of information to me: _[Dawn] won’t be sending back
any pictures or data until late April, when it reemerges from Ceres’s dark
side. When it does, it will start to map the surface, analyze the chemical
composition, and make the most accurate measurements yet of the planet’s
mass._

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S4M
Thanks, that article is indeed better, I hope a moderator can change it.

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dang
OK. Url changed to that from [http://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-31754586](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31754586).
We'll keep the latter's title since it's more informative.

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Piskvorrr
Initially misread as "Nasa's Dawn probe-bears down on Ceres".

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raldi

        s/-/: /

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mlonkibjuyhv
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