A NASA spacecraft just became the first manmade object to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet, the space agency announced on Friday. The Dawn spacecraft will likely provide new images showing the mysterious reflective spots, which look like lights in infrared imagery, that have scientists scratching their heads.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft alerted mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California just after 8:30 a.m. ET "that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine" -- a sign that orbit was achieved when the planet's gravity "captured" the spacecraft.
Went into orbit at #Ceres at 4:39 a.m. PST today. Read all about it: http://t.co/7nKx3UmY2t Recent image: pic.twitter.com/xTogoLgfoN— NASA's Dawn Mission (@NASA_Dawn) March 6, 2015
An hour later, the mission's Twitter account confirmed the news, tweeting: "I am in orbit around around Ceres."
"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL, in a NASA statement.
"Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home."
"We feel exhilarated," added Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California. "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," he said.
Ceres has perplexed scientists since Dawn beamed back images of the dwarf planet that showed two mysterious reflective spots.
"This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, in a NASA statement. "The brightest spot [of the two] continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres."
A GIF that JPL released last week showed the two strange spots shining brightly as Ceres rotated in space.