Dawn Spacecraft Captures First Image of Nearing Asteroid
May 11, 2011
Source: NASA/JPL
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn expects to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 117 million miles from Earth.
The image from Dawn’s framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles (1.21 million kilometers) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet.
“After plying the seas of space for more than a billion miles, the Dawn team finally spotted its target,” said
Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This first image hints of detailed portraits to come from Dawn’s upcoming visit.”
Vesta is 330 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes obtained images of the bright orb for about two centuries, but with little surface detail.
Mission managers expect Vesta’s gravity to capture Dawn in orbit on July 16. To enter orbit, Dawn must match the asteroid’s path around the Sun, which requires very precise knowledge of the body’s location and speed. By analyzing where Vesta appears relative to stars in framing camera images, navigators will pin down its location and enable engineers to refine the spacecraft’s trajectory.
Dawn will start collecting science data in early August at an altitude of approximately 1700 miles (2700 kilometers) above the asteroid’s surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, it will snap multi-angle images, allowing scientists to produce topographic maps. Dawn will later orbit at approximately 120 miles (200 kilometers) to perform other measurements and obtain closer shots of parts of the surface. Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for one year. After another long cruise phase, Dawn will arrive in 2015 at its second destination, Ceres, an even more massive body in the asteroid belt.
Gathering information about these two icons of the asteroid belt will help scientists unlock the secrets of our solar system’s early history. The mission will compare and contrast the two giant asteroids shaped by different forces. Dawn’s science instruments will measure surface composition, topography, and texture. Dawn also will measure the tug of gravity from Vesta and Ceres to learn more about their internal structures. The spacecraft’s full odyssey will take it on a 3-billion-mile (5-billion-kilometer) journey, which began with its launch in September 2007.
For more information about the Dawn mission, visit
Dawn: Journey to the Asteroid Belt
Last updated May 11, 2011
