NASA's Dawn spacecraft slipped into orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres on Friday, in a manner as cool and quiet as the soft blue glow of its ion engines. <\/p>\n
Eight years and 3 billion miles after its launch, the boxy probe was captured by Ceres' gravitational pull at 7:39 a.m. ET (4:39 a.m. PT), said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. <\/p>\n
Confirmation that Dawn was healthy and on the right track came about an hour after the event, during JPL's routine communication session with the spacecraft. But because of the gentle, steady thrust of Dawn's ion propulsion system, there was never much question that the orbital mechanics would work out the way Rayman and his teammates expected. <\/p>\n
\"We feel exhilarated,\" UCLA astronomer Chris Russell, the Dawn mission's principal investigator, said in a celebratory NASA news release. <\/p>\n
This wasn't your typical orbital insertion. <\/p>\n
\"Usually, there's a big, bone-rattling, whiplash-producing maneuver,\" Rayman told NBC News, \"but Dawn flies most of the time on this pillar of blue-green xenon ions, just like a spacecraft from science fiction. ... It's a beautiful celestial pas de deux, these two dancers together. I think it's really a remarkable scene to imagine. It's so different from what we're accustomed to from five decades of previous space exploration.\" <\/p>\n
This also isn't your typical target for an interplanetary mission. Ceres is a type of world that's never been visited before. <\/p>\n
With a diameter of 590 miles, it's the biggest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, orbiting about 250 million miles from the sun. When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered one of the major planets but as more asteroids were discovered, it came to be left off the list. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union classified Ceres as a dwarf planet, along with Pluto, because it's big enough to retain a round shape but doesn't necessarily stand out in a celestial crowd. <\/p>\n
Dawn is the first spacecraft to go into orbit around a dwarf planet. Another NASA probe, New Horizons, is due to fly past Pluto in July. Will these close-ups change Ceres' planetary label again? Rayman doesn't much care about the nomenclature. \"Whatever you call it, it's something very special,\" he said. <\/p>\n
Ceres could have a huge reservoir of water ice beneath its cratered crust and in the solar system's early days, it might have even been suitable for life. Studying the dwarf planet could provide new insights into how the solar system was formed. And then there's Ceres' biggest mystery: a pair of bright spots that shine like alien headlights when sunlight hits them just the right way. <\/p>\n
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NASA Probe Slips Into Orbit Around Dwarf Planet Ceres<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA's Dawn spacecraft slipped into orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres on Friday, in a manner as cool and quiet as the soft blue glow of its ion engines. Eight years and 3 billion miles after its launch, the boxy probe was captured by Ceres' gravitational pull at 7:39 a.m Continue reading