NASA’s Dawn Mission is scheduled to launch on Saturday, July 7 at 4:09 PM EDT (9:09 PM in London). If it doesn’t launch then, there are other opportunities on the following days. Check the official website for an up-to-date launch time.
UPDATE: The Dawn launch has been postponed until September, but everything else in this post is still true.
Live video of the launch will be shown at the theatre on JPL’s Explorer Island in the virtual world of Second Life.
You are invited to come watch the video with space and science enthusiasts from around the world. Launch events are always interesting.
Photo Credit: NASA
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Dawn is of interest to me because it’s the first NASA science mission to use low-thrust primary propulsion (via an ion engine) plus a gravity-assist maneuver (at Mars). Those are the sorts of missions I worked on optimising for my PhD.
The complete Dawn mission sequence is:
- Earth launch
- Mars gravity assist
- Orbit the asteroid Vesta for about 6 months
- Orbit the asteroid Ceres
Vesta and Ceres are big asteroids. Okay, okay, so Ceres is known as a “dwarf planet” this week. No telling what it will be called next week. For many years after Ceres was discovered, it was known as a planet.
Amazingly, the composition of Vesta is fairly well-known due to some 200 HED meteorites that landed on Earth after apparently being blown off Vesta in some kind of cosmic collision.
A HED Meteorite, the Johnstown Diogenite (Photo Credit: NASA)
You might also like this video about the Dawn Mission, narrated by Leonard Nimoy (who played Mr. Spock in Star Trek).
Copyright© 2007 by T. Troy McConaghy.
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