India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

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Calling human space flight the next logical step, he said the mission is targeting a weeklong journey.

"Human space flight is in our plans. In 2006-07 a feasibility study began on the capability of India to launch a human space flight. The spacecraft will travel 275 to 400 million kilometres around the earth for a week and on its return will launch in the ocean. We found it is feasible," Radhakrishnan told the D D Kosambi Festival of Ideas.

He added that constructing a spacecraft reliable enough to carry humans is the biggest challenge for Isro.

"A vehicle should be such that only one failure in 100 flights can be tolerated. Several things have to be taken care of in the design. If some failure is taking place in the vehicle, we have to know at least nine seconds before so that the crew can be ejected out safely."

He said the GSLV-MK-IIIthe Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk-III, India's largest rocket to dateis suitable for the human space flight mission as its lower section can carry a weight of up to 10 tonnes, which amounts to around 2-3 crew members.

Asked if the country is also working towards a programme that can send humans as tourists to and from Mars, Radhakrishnan indicated that such a plan is far off for the country for now.

Speaking about India's Mars Orbiter Mission, he said ISRO had plan B in place if the onboard liquid engine of Mangalyaan failed to start for the Mars orbit insertion after being in sleep mode for 300 days. "If the main rocket refused to fire, we had plan Bto fire the small thrusters for a very long time. But we didn't have to use plan B."

He said Mangalyaan has now provided a great amount of technology to feed other missions for the country.

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India ready for own space mission: K Radhakrishnan, former Isro

Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

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XCOR will offer suborbital flights that will reach the edge of space, about 100km above the ground.

There are a number of misconceptions about space tourism, the most significant being that it doesn't exist yet.

In fact, it's been around since 2001, when Dennis Tito reportedly stumped up $US20 million ($25.6 million) to tag along on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission. The NASA rocket scientist-turned-entrepreneur spent almost eight days orbiting the earth.

It won't be long until people are saying 'travelling into space is so last year'.

Another widespread misapprehension is that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the only company offering extra-terrestrial travel. As we'll get to shortly, there is actually a healthy field of commercial space travel companies developing a diverse range of trips.

An artists' impression of the World View capsule suspended from a balloon at the edge of space. Photo: World View

The good news for aspiring astronauts is that it should soon be possible to travel into space for as little as $75,000. The bad news is the fare will still translate to a minimum of $250 for every minute spent aloft - and that's without even considering the inescapable dangers involved.

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Commercial space travel can be divided into three categories: orbital, suborbital and what might be labelled sub-suborbital.

Space tourist Dennis Tito (left) on the Russian Federal Space Agency's ISS EP-1 mission in 2001. Photo: AP

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Space travel still big business, despite Virgin mishap

Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

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IMAGE:The 2012 image (bottom) is the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million year-old star Beta Pictoris. The 1997 Hubble image (top) shows... view more

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed edge on picture to date of a large disk of gas and dust encircling the 20 million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allows scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.

The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.

"Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models that will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks," said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, Tucson. These structures include a warp in the inner disk caused by the giant planet.

When comparing the latest 2012 images to Hubble images taken in 1997, astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. This means the disk's structure is smooth and continuous, at least over the interval between the Hubble observations.

In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Since then, Beta Pictoris has been an object of intense scrutiny with Hubble and ground-based telescopes.

The disk is easily seen because of its edge-on angle, and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust. What's more, Beta Pictoris is 63 light-years away, closer to Earth than most of the other known disk systems.

Though nearly all of the approximately two-dozen known light-scattering circumstellar disks have been viewed by Hubble to date, Beta Pictoris is the first and best example of what a young planetary system looks like.

For one thing, the Beta Pictoris disk is exceptionally dusty. This may be due to recent major collisions among unseen planet and asteroid-sized objects embedded within the disk. In particular, a bright lobe of dust and gas on the southwestern side of the disk may be the result of the pulverization of a Mars-sized object in a giant collision.

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Hubble gets best view of circumstellar debris disk distorted by planet

ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

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IMAGE:From left to right: Gerhard Meister, Bryan Monosmith and Chuck McClain are shown here with the ORCA prototype, which is a strong contender for a NASA Earth science mission. view more

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Hrybyk

Its name refers to one of the biggest animals in the sea, but ORCA, the Ocean Radiometer for Carbon Assessment instrument, will be observing the smallest.

If selected for a flight mission, ORCA will study microscopic phytoplankton, tiny green plants that float in the upper layer of the ocean and make up the base of the marine food chain.

Conceived in 2001 as the next technological step forward in observing ocean color, the ORCA-development team used funding from Goddard's Internal Research and Development program and NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) to develop a prototype. Completed in 2014, ORCA now is a contender as the primary instrument on an upcoming Earth science mission.

Should it be chosen, ORCA will take ocean-color monitoring to the next level, helping scientists to more precisely measure marine photosynthesis, which is key to the carbon cycle and the ocean food chain.

Like its predecessors that also measured ocean color, the instrument will observe phytoplankton, which blooms en masse, covering hundreds of square miles of the sea surface at once and leaving a trail that is clearly visible from space. In particular, researchers will observe global changes in ocean color to estimate concentrations of chlorophyll, the pigment plants use for photosynthesis -- the process during which the tiny plants convert energy from the sun and carbon dioxide into organic compounds that support life.

About a fourth of man-made carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean, said Chuck McClain, former ORCA principal investigator with Goddard's Ocean Color Group. "The ocean is a big sink for CO2 and part of that sink involves ocean biology."

ORCA builds on the work Goddard scientists and engineers pioneered in the development of ocean color sensors. Goddard's proof-of-concept -- the Coastal Zone Color Scanner that flew on Nimbus-7 from 1978 to 1986 -- was the first sensor to demonstrate that ocean chlorophyll could be measured from space. NASA's Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor mission, which collected data from 1997 to 2010, was the first flagship mission to routinely observe ocean color for long-term climate research. Currently, researchers employ the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.

ORCA's Distinguishing Characteristics

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ORCA prototype ready for the open ocean

NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise

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IMAGE:In this photo, Huang is holding a test board upon which her Ka-band/microwave design is mounted and bonded. Marrero-Fontanez is on her right. view more

Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

The radio frequency band that many NASA missions use to communicate with spacecraft -- S-band -- is getting a bit crowded and noisy, and likely to get more jammed as science missions demand higher and higher data rates.

A team of NASA technologists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, just may have a solution, particularly for potential missions that plan to operate in low-Earth orbit and have limited real estate to accommodate communications gear.

Under two different research and development projects, technologists Mae Huang and Victor Marrero-Fontanez have collaborated to test and verify components of a prototype end-to-end Ka-band space communications system, which promises significantly higher data rates -- a whopping 2.4 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) -- over more traditional S-band systems, which theoretically could achieve data rates of 90 megabits of data per second (Mbps).

Huang is working with Goddard's Jeffrey Jaso -- a pioneer in Ka-Band communications -- to develop a Ka-band transmitter. Marrero-Fontanez, meanwhile, is designing Ka-band antennas to receive the Ka-band signals. Huang and Marrero-Fontanez plan to assemble a prototype in 2015.

Huang also will be delivering an engineering test unit of her transmitter to a Goddard team that is considering the technology's use on the proposed Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST, a next-generation observatory proposed for launch in the mid-2020s. WFIRST would carry out wide-field imaging and slitless spectroscopic surveys of the near-infrared sky, with an emphasis on studying dark energy and exoplanets. Due to its heavy data-rate requirements, the project provided Huang with some funding to advance her technology, she said.

WFIRST isn't the only mission looking for a compact, low-power, end-to-end system. Future Earth-observing missions also are expected to generate higher and higher data rates that could overwhelm the S-band allocations that are shared by space missions using NASA's Near-Earth Network and Deep Space Network and Federal and commercial operations.

"In a sense it's like rush-hour traffic. When you start your morning commute, you may notice fewer cars, but before you know it, you're in stop-and-go traffic as more cars merge onto the highway. The world's frequency bands are beginning to look a lot like bumper-to-bumper traffic," she said. "Cell phones, streaming video, and data communications are all placing big strains on available bandwidth. Meanwhile, commercial businesses are putting pressure on the government to free up other bands, pushing more Federal operations into the S-band that NASA uses. Couple that with NASA's expected need to transmit and receive greater and greater amounts of mission data, something will have to give."

Although NASA has had the Ka-band allocation for years and has used the frequency on past missions, the band has remained underused for a variety of reasons, mainly because of limited technology development, perceived technical challenges, among other things," Marrero-Fontanez said. "However, NASA has always had a strong interest in using this frequency allocation," he added, particularly because it can significantly increase data throughput by a factor of more than 100 as compared with S-band.

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NASA team develops new Ka-band communications system to break through the noise

Littleton to end red-light camera program this summer

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(Joe Amon, Denver Post file photo)

City leaders on Tuesday voted to end Littleton's red-light camera program this summer, claiming the system has done little to reduce accidents in the city.

A study done by the city revealed that while injury accidents decreased slightly at three of the five intersections where the cameras are used, non-injury accidents have actually increased at four of those intersections.

Littleton's vote comes a week after a House committee in the state legislature approved banning radar and red-light cameras. Ban proponents call the cameras "cash cows" for the nine Colorado cities that use them.

Besides Littleton, the cities include Denver, Fort Collins, Aurora, Boulder, Pueblo, Commerce City, Greenwood Village and Sheridan.

Littleton reported that the red-light camera system generated "surplus net revenue" for the city over the 67,614 citations issued from 2009 to 2014. The system cost Littleton approximately $650,000 annually.

The police department concluded that the program had a "positive effect" on driving behavior due to the fact that violations at four of five intersections has continued to go down each year. But the city says the cameras are no longer necessary to reinforce the good driving behavior.

The city council voted 7-0 to allow Littleton's contract with American Traffic Solutions to expire on July 31.

John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold

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NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Makes History As It Reaches Dwarf Planet Ceres – Video

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NASA #39;s Dawn Spacecraft Makes History As It Reaches Dwarf Planet Ceres
http://www.undergroundworldnews.com WASHINGTON, March 7 (UPI) -- After more than seven years traveling, NASA #39;s Dawn spacecraft has reached Ceres. "NASA #39;s Dawn spacecraft has become the ...

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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Makes History As It Reaches Dwarf Planet Ceres - Video

NASA's Orion initial data yields few surprises, guides next mission

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Lockheed Martin Orion team members remove the spacecraft's back shell panels and to perform post-flight assessments at Kennedy Space Center, following EFT-1. Lockheed Martin will provide a complete data analysis report to NASA by March 5. (Lockheed Martin Space Systems)

The high-profile NASA Orion Experimental Flight Test-1 in December went optimally, and a "huge amount" was learned from the data gathered from the flight, Lockheed Martin's Orion Program Manager Mike Hawes said Wednesday.

Lockheed Martin is NASA's prime contractor on the Orion mission.

Many of the specifics of Orion's EFT-1 performance won't be available until NASA receives an official report on March 5, Hawes said. However, he did offer several highlights: the heat shield worked optimally, the mission used less fuel than expected, and flight cameras built by Broomfield-based Ball Aerospace did precisely what they were designed to do.

Hawes also said Wednesday that a whopping 600 gigabytes of data were collected during the 4 hour, 24 minute test flight.

"When we talk about data and the importance of a flight test, so many of our tools are analytical tools that have been rooted in models," Hawes said. "Now, those models get rooted in data."

The success of EFT-1 brings NASA one step closer to the goal of crewed deep-space flight: The agency will next launch an uncrewed Orion mission in 2018, and a crewed mission in 2021.

However, there is work to be done before humans are placed on the next generation spacecraft and all the data now in NASA's hands will be used to guide the development of future Orion iterations.

"That continued analysis will bring the understanding and the modifications that might be applicable to the next mission," Hawes said.

Among initial findings released Wednesday:

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NASA's Orion initial data yields few surprises, guides next mission

NASA probes catch solar shockwave in action for the first time

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File photo.(REUTERS/NASA/SDO/Handout)

For the first time ever, NASAs Van Allen Probes caught the before and after effects of a solar shockwave as it was happening. The event, which occurred on October 8, 2013, was triggered by an explosion that erupted on the suns surface, sending a shockwave of solar wind careening through space. After passing the moon, the shockwave hurtled toward Earth before running head-on into the magnetic field surrounding our planet. This impact then set off a magnetized sound pulse, which reverberated around Earth.

Though the shockwave occurred two years ago, the twin spacecrafts data was only recently analyzed by MITs Haystack Observatory and the University Of Colorado, among others.

Interplanetary shocks, traveling toward Earth from the Sun, have been observed and studied before, John Foster, associate director of the Haystack Observatory, told Fox News. What is of major interest in the event reported are the direct observations of the effects of the shock on Earths Van Allen radiation belts with sufficient detail to reveal the processes taking place. Although the main strength of the solar shock is deflected by the magnetic shield that surrounds our planet, a brief pulse of energy penetrates closer to Earth where it accelerates radiation belt electrons to ultra-relativistic energies in less than a minute.

These radiation belt electrons are no joke. Dubbed killer electrons, these ultra-relativistic lightweight particles are capable of going right through a satellite. According to NASA, killer electrons cause a lot of irreparable spacecraft damage, so understanding them is a top priority. They fly around at light speed and can easily break through thick shielding before burrowing into the insulation surrounding sensitive satellite equipment. The electricity from the accumulating electrons then builds up, causing a strong internal electrical discharge. One could equate it to a bolt of lighting striking your satellite dish, potentially causing a major hiccup right in the middle of Shark Week.

NASAs Van Allen Probes twin-satellite mission was conceived and launched to provide the comprehensive observations needed to identify and understand the processes responsible energizing these high-energy particles that circle Earth, Foster added. The processes observed during this shock event indicate that Earths magnetosphere can act as a highly efficient particle accelerator capable of creating the highest (ultra-relativistic) energies in regions close to Earth in a matter of seconds.

By better understanding these havoc-wreaking particles, NASA should be able to construct killer electron-resistant spacecrafts.

The probes maintain the same orbit within the Van Allen radiation belts, with one moving forth and the other following about an hour behind as they circle the Earth. On October 8, 2013, the lead probe was in the right place at the right time to record the events that occurred before the shockwave blast. The following probe was then able to document what happened afterwards.

The constant activity on the surface of the Sun is punctuated by violent outbursts powered the Suns strong magnetic field. Solar flares emit bursts of X-rays that travel outward at the speed of light, Foster said. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are giant eruptions of hot gasses from the Suns outer atmosphere. As this blast wave of solar material (plasma) streams towards the planets at 1000 km/sec, it sweeps up the magnetic field in its path, creating a magnetized shockwave of the type that struck Earths magnetic field on October 8, 2013.

After striking the magnetic field, the shockwave then bounced away, creating a magnetosonic pulse which flew in the opposite direction. In only a few minutes, this magnetized sound wave then propagated to the other side of the planet. As it traveled, the magnetosonic pulse collected lower-energy particles that grew in energy to 3 to 4 million electronvolts. The number of killer electrons also grew, multiplying to ten times the amount that had existed prior to the shockwaves journey.

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NASA probes catch solar shockwave in action for the first time

NASA covers Tropical Cyclone Lam's landfall in northern territory

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IMAGE:The GPM core observatory found rainfall at 55 mm/2.2 inches per hour in Tropical Cyclone Lam on February 17, 2015 at 1256 UTC northwest of the center. Some cloud tops... view more

As Tropical Cyclone Lam made landfall in Australia's Northern Territory on Feb. 19 (EST), NASA satellites and instruments gathered data on the storm's structure and behavior. Two instruments aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, NASA-JAXA's GPM core satellite, the RapidScat instrument aboard the International Space Station provided information to forecasters before and after Lam came ashore.

On Feb. 17 when Lam was strengthening in the Arafura Sea, NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM core observatory satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Lam at 1256 UTC and captured data on the rainfall rates within the storm. At that time, sustained winds were estimated to be increasing above 55 knots (63 mph). GPM's Microwave Imager (GMI) measured rain falling at a rate of almost 55 mm (2.2 inches) per hour in powerful storms to the northwest of Lam's center. A 3-D view of cyclone Lam's vertical structure was made possible by using GPM's radar (Ku band) data that showed some thunderstorm tops above 7.8 miles (12.6 km).

Another instrument took a look at the winds of the storm from its perch in space. The International Space Station's RapidScat instrument captured a look at Tropical Cyclone Lam's winds as it was moving toward landfall. From Feb. 18 at 1:40 UTC to 3:13 UTC RapidScat saw sustained winds to 56 mph/90 kph/25 mps.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a stunning picture of the storm as the center was making landfall on Feb. 19 at 04:40 UTC. The center was an eye-like feature obscured by clouds as it exited the Arafura Sea and came ashore near Elcho and Howard Islands in the northeastern part of the Northern Territory.

Another instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided infrared data on the thunderstorms that make up the tropical cyclone. A tropical cyclone is made up of hundreds of thunderstorms. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard Aqua gathers infrared data to provide temperature data. The higher the thunderstorm in the troposphere, the colder the cloud tops. AIRS saw cloud tops around the center of circulation as cold as -63F/-52C. NASA research has shown that thunderstorm cloud tops that cold have the potential to drop heavy rainfall, which mirrors and confirms the GPM core satellites observations even two days before.

On Feb. 19 (EST)/Feb. 20 1 a.m. local time, Brisbane, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) noted "The very destructive core of Cyclone Lam is impacting the mainland coast between Milingimbi and Elcho Island." Warning zone: Goulburn Island to Port Roper, including Nhulunbuy, Groote Eylandt and adjacent inland areas to Bulman. For the updated ABM warnings and watches, visit: http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDD65011.shtml

At 0900 UTC (4 a.m. EST) on Feb. 19, Tropical Cyclone Lam was centered near 11.7 south latitude and 135.7 east longitude, about 286 nautical miles (329.1 miles/529.7 km) east-northeast of Darwin, Australia and moving to the southwest at 4 knots(4.6 mph/7.4 kph). Maximum sustained winds 90 knots (103.6 mph/166.7 kph). By 10:30 a.m. EST (Feb. 20 at 1:30 a.m. local Darwin time) the ABM noted that Lam's sustained winds were near 99.9 knots/115 mph/185 mph.

There are many warnings and watches in effect. A Cyclone Warning is in effect from Goulburn Island to Cape Shield, including Nhulunbuy and Groote Eylandt. A Cyclone Watch: Numbulwar to Port Roper.

According to the latest report from the Australian Bureau of Meterology, on Feb. 19 at 15:30 UTC (10:30 a.m. EST/Feb. 20 at 1:30 a.m. local Darwin time) Lam's center was near 12.2 degrees south and 135.0 degrees east. That puts the center of Lam about 37 miles (60 kilometers) west-southwest of Galiwinku and 9 miles (15 kilometers) east southeast of Milingimbi. Lam is moving to the southwest at 4.9 mph (8 kph).

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NASA covers Tropical Cyclone Lam's landfall in northern territory

NASAs Dawn spacecraft achieves Ceres orbit, makes history

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NASAs Dawn spacecraft successfully entered Ceres' orbit early on Friday, making history as the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet.

Dawn was approximately 38,000 miles from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planets gravity at approximately 7:39 a.m. ET.

Ceres, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is 310 million miles from Earth.

Mission controllers at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which is managing the mission, received a signal from Dawn at 8:36 a.m ET, showing that the spacecraft was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine. The engine thrust was a key indicator that Dawn had entered Ceres orbit as planned.

"We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in a statement. "We have much to do over the next year and a half, but we are now on station with ample reserves, and a robust plan to obtain our science objectives."

Launched in September 2007, Dawn has travelled 3.1 billion miles to reach Ceres. The spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012, and began its final approach to Ceres in December. The Dawn mission is scheduled to end in June 2016, at which time the spacecraft will remain in Ceres orbit.

Scientists hope that NASAs investigation of Ceres will boost our understanding of how the solar system formed.

Images of Ceres have already revealed craters and unusual bright spots that scientists believe tell how Ceres formed and whether its surface is changing. NASA says that as Dawn spirals into closer and closer orbits around the planet, researchers will be looking for signs that these features are changing, which would suggest current geological activity.

Since Jan. 25, Dawn has been delivering the highest-resolution images of Ceres ever captured, and they will continue to improve in quality as the spacecraft approaches, according to NASA.

The most recent images received from Dawn were taken on March 1 and show Ceres as a crescent, largely in shadow because the spacecraft's trajectory put it on a side of Ceres that faces away from the sun until mid-April, according to NASA. When Dawn emerges from Ceres' dark side, NASA expects the spacecraft to deliver ever-sharper images as it spirals to lower orbits around the planet

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NASAs Dawn spacecraft achieves Ceres orbit, makes history