It's Sunset for NASA's Dawn, Asteroid Purpose Belt Probe's Legacy Lives On

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which studied two large objects in the asteroid belt, but it is now a long time ago, but the spacecraft's science will be legacy will live on.

Dawn was the first spacecraft to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies. The mission has been technically challenged before the spacecraft, but Dawn launched in September 2007 with its sights set on the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, chosen for each other. While they are only two of the billions of objects in the asteroid belt, they contain a whopping 45 percent of its mass. NASA announced the end of Dawn's asteroid

"Both Vesta and Ceres had previously only been viewed by the stars," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's mission director at NASA, told Space.com. "Now we have these richly detailed, intimate portraits of alien lands and complex geology, and we have never really imagined before, unveiling secrets that these bodies have held for billions of years." [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft]

In order to succeed, the Dawn spacecraft needed a careful trajectory and a secret weapon – an ion propulsion system, which had only one previous mission. As the mission played out, that system has been allowed to become flexible as long as it has been established at Ceres.

Scientists were oddly familiar with Dawn's first destination, Vesta, thanks to a cosmic quirk: the majority of meteorites that have fallen to earth are actually chunks of this distant object. But seeing planetary rubble that pummels our planet is not the same as it is in its full glory – and that's exactly what we're doing, starting with its arrival in 2011.

"All of the Vesta images were super cool," Kristina Larson, NASA's Systems Engineer on the Mission, told Space.com. She has been working on the subject of the past few years, and she has been working on the subject. "Vesta is such a funky-looking body, it's not very spherical and it's just super heavily cratered."

Vesta's funky appearance is scientifically interesting as well. "The entire planet-like reverberated body," Rayman said. During Dawn's time at Vesta, he said that he was continually impressed by how successful the mission was. "I always felt like the spacecraft just mysteriously died that day, at least we would have a valuable return for what we had invested."

The spacecraft did have a near-death experience as it left Vesta, jeopardizing Dawn's ability to send data home. The engineers on the team hustled their way to a substituting fuel maneuvers, which saved the mission.

In 2015, Dawn reached its second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres. Here, its discoveries include the most relevant areas of the world. But for Rayman, they're also stunning. "How can you be mesmerized by these things?" he said. "The way I like to think of it is as if it's casting its light on the shining its light across the interplanetary ocean." [Photos: Dwarf Planet Ceres, the Solar System’s Largest Asteroid]

Dawn has also been revealed as a million years ago, a giant ice volcano dubbed Ahuna Mons liquid water, with dozens more compatriots, making the dwarf planet's composition and geology a particularly complex puzzle. "It's kind of a hybrid world," Lynnae Quick, a planetary scientist at the National Air and Space Museum who works with Dawn, told Space.com. "Because Ceres has this kind of exotic composition, you can not just think about it, and it makes it interesting."

As the spacecraft has inched closer – when it ran out of fuel, it was skimming as close as 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the dwarf planet 's surface – its views Dawn's time at Ceres has reshaped scientists' opinions of the object, team members said, and now it's a viable candidate for a return mission. In large part, that's because of the boxes scientists checked off their search-for-life criteria.

Julie Castillo-Rogez, a NASA scientist on the mission at Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa which have been astrobiological contenders for much longer. In order to protect any life that can be hired on Ceres, the spacecraft is designed to keep track of the planet for at least 20 years, in case NASA decides to build a follow-up mission.

NASA is already working on a $ 467 million Dawn mission: Psyche. Like Dawn, it will visit an asteroid – and like Dawn, it will do so thanks to an ion propulsion system. And the scientists behind Dawn hope they have paved the way for more excursions to tiny corners of our solar system.

"I hope there's going to be many, many missions like [Dawn] that follow, "Carol Raymond, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, told Space.com." We have a new way of exploring farther into the solar system and going to smaller, information they hold. "

Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.