Sept. 26, 2007 — NASA is about to embark on an unprecedented asteroid-belt mission with a spacecraft aptly named Dawn.
The 3 billion-mile, eight-year journey to probe the earliest stages of the solar system will begin with liftoff, planned for just after sunrise Thursday. Rain is forecast, however, and could force a delay.
Scientists have been waiting for Dawn to rise since July, when the mission was put off because of the more pressing need to launch NASA's latest Mars lander, Phoenix. Once Phoenix rocketed away in August, that cleared the way for Dawn.
"For the people in the Bahamas, on the 27th will be one day where they can say that Dawn will rise in the west," said a smiling Keyur Patel, project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Dawn will travel to the two biggest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — rocky Vesta and icy Ceres from the planet-forming period of the solar system.
Check out the cool job of a planetary protection officer.
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Ceres is so big — as wide as Texas — that it's been reclassified a dwarf planet. The spacecraft will spend a year orbiting Vesta, about the length of Arizona, from 2011 to 2012, then fly to Ceres and circle there in 2015.
Dawn's three science instruments — a camera, infrared spectrometer, and gamma ray and neutron detector — will explore Vesta and Ceres from varying altitudes.
