DAWN PROBE ARRIVES AT DWARF PLANET CERES
by Hazed
There’s a lot of space probe action this year. The latest one to provide some excitement is the Dawn probe, which has spent the last seven and a half years travelling to reach its destination: Ceres.
It arrived and took up an orbit around the dwarf planet on Friday, with a signal received by ground control confirming its status.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt – it’s so large it has the status of a dwarf planet, the same as Pluto. Scientists think that Ceres, along with Vesta, which Dawn visited on the way, are proto planets. “They were on their way to forming larger planetary embryos and they were the type of object that merged to form the terrestrial planets,” Dr Carol Raymond from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained. “But these two stopped before they reached that evolutionary stage, and so they are essentially these intact ‘time capsules’ from the very beginning of our Solar System; and that’s really the motivation for why Dawn is going there to explore them in detail.”
The researchers think that Cere has a rocky core covered with ice, which is then insulated by more rocky deposits at the surface.
Dawn will be working for at least 14 months before it runs out of fuel, so we should be able to learn a lot about the makeup of the dwarf planet. Of course, I’ll report on whatever is discovered.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31754586
