It’s a journey more than seven years in the making. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has begun its approach toward Ceres, a dwarf planet NASA says has never been visited by a spacecraft.
And that approach is a long one. The Dawn spacecraft is still a whopping 400,000 miles away from Ceres, but it’s moving at speeds of up to 450 miles per hour, so it’s on track to arrive in early March.
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The craft navigates with the help of special ion thrusters.
“We give the gas xenon a little electric charge. And then they’re called ions. And we use a big voltage to accelerate the xenon ions through this metal grid. And we shoot them out of the engine at up to 90,000 mph. And they’re going out so fast, that each individual ion gives a relatively large push back on the spacecraft,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn Chief Engineer and Mission Director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a NASA video.
Dawn has been quite productive whilst floating about in space. NASA says the spacecraft spent 14 months studying Vesta, a giant asteroid also known as a protoplanet.
While gathering gobs of useful information about Vesta is a noble achievement, Dawn’s principal investigator says there’s something very exciting about the upcoming study of Ceres.
“Ceres is almost a complete mystery to us. Ceres, unlike Vesta, has no meteorites linked to it to help reveal its secrets. All we can predict with confidence is that we will be surprised.”
While they don't really know what they'll encounter at Ceres, researchers are hoping to find and study water and ice on the planet to learn a little bit more about the formation of our solar system.
You can keep up with DAWN’s progress on NASA’s page devoted to the project.