Small Bodies Mission Support

The DAWN spacecraft launched September 27, 2007, 7:34 a.m. EDT. DAWN completed an initial check phase in early December 2007 and began its interplanetary cruise phase on December 17-21, 2007. A Mars gravity assist is scheduled for February 9, 2009. It will put the spacecraft on a trajectory to rendezvous with the asteroid 4 Vesta in August 2011. After 11 months of observing, the spacecraft will depart from Vesta in May 2012 and spend over 2.5 years years travelling to the dwarf planet Ceres (or 1 Ceres, the asteroid). DAWN will rendezvous with Ceres in February 2015 and will spend 6 months taking measurements before departing in July 2015 (end of mission).

Dawn's primary science goal is to gain an understanding of the conditions and processes occurring when the solar system was only about 10 million years old. It will measure the size, shape, mass, volume and spin rate of the two protoplanets, Vesta and Ceres, to determine their internal structure, density and homogeneity. Dawn will also investigate their thermal history by measuring the elemental and mineral abundances. It will image their surfaces to determine their bombardment and tectonic history, and use gravity, spin and magnetic data to limit the size of any metallic core.

The DAWN Mission web site is maintained by UCLA.

The SBN is the lead PDS node to archive the DAWN mission data.

Instrument/Investigation	Measuring	Small Bodies Data available below
Framing Camera (FC)	Full surface imagery in seven colors at Vesta and three at Ceres	none
Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIR)	Full surface mineralogical mapping in three bands: 0.35-0.9, 0.8-2.5, and 2.4-5.0 micron	none
Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND)	Abundances of major rock-forming elements (O, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, and Fe), trace elements (Gd and Sm), long-lived radioactive elements (K, Th, and U), and light elements such as H, C, and N which are major constituents of ices	none
Radio Science (RSS)	Radio tracking to determine mass, gravity field, principal axes, rotational axis and moments of inertia	none

Instrument/ Investigation Description	Target	Description of Available Data	Data Link
No data available yet

Target	Target Type	Other Data Sets Targeting this Object
4 Vesta	Asteroid
1 Ceres/Ceres	Asteroid/Dwarf Planet

Last update: 26 March 2008, McLaughlin