It's Sunset for NASA's Dawn, But Asteroid Belt Probe's Legacy Lives On
Obtener enlace
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Correo electrónico
Otras aplicaciones
It's Sunset for NASA's Dawn, But Asteroid Belt Probe's Legacy Lives On
It's Sunset for NASA's Dawn, But Asteroid Belt Probe's Legacy Lives On
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which studied two large objects in the asteroid belt, officially it has run out of fuel, completing its mission to shed light on the first days of the solar system, but the scientific legacy of the spacecraft will last.
Dawn was the first spacecraft to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies. The mission was technically canceled twice before the ship took off, but Dawn was launched in September 2007 with an eye on the asteroid. Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, chosen for how little they resembled each other. While they are only two of the billions of objects in the asteroid belt, they contain a whopping 45 percent of their mass. NASA announced the end of the Dawn asteroid mission on Thursday (November 1).
"Previously, both Vesta and Ceres had mostly been seen as only faint spots of light in the middle of the stars," Marc Rayman, director of NASA's Dawn mission, told Space.com. "Now we have these intimate and richly detailed portraits of strange terrains and complex geology and only a wealth of details that we had never imagined before, revealing secrets that these bodies have kept for billions of years."
To have success, the spaceship Dawn I needed a careful trajectory and a secret weapon: an ion propulsion system, which had only driven an earlier mission. As the mission developed, that system gave engineers the flexibility to spend twice as much time in Vesta as originally planned and almost five times longer in Ceres.
Artistic representation of the Dawn spacecraft between Ceres (left) and Vesta (right) (not shown to scale).
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
<img class = "pure-img lazy" big-src = "https://www.space.com/images/i/000/046/106/original/dawn-vesta-ceres-asteroids-infographic-110708d-02 -big.jpg? 1425646559 "src = data 'https://img.purch.com/w/192/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA0Ni8xMDYvaTMwMC9kYXduLXZlc3RhLWNlcmVzLWFzdGVyb2lkcy1pbmZvZ3JhcGhpYy0xMTA3MDhkLTAyLWJpZy5qcGc/MTQyNTY0NjU1OQ==' alt =" spacecraft NASA Dawn is the first time to visit two goals in the Asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. See how NASA's Dawn spacecraft will visit the Vesta and Ceres asteroids in this Space.com infographic. "data-options-closecontrol =" true "data-options-fullsize =" true "/>
Credit: Karl Tate / Space.com
The scientists were strangely familiar with Dawn's first destiny, Vesta, thanks to a cosmic peculiarity: most of the meteorites that have fallen to Earth are actually pieces of this distant object. But seeing planetary debris that hits our planet is not the same as seeing an asteroid in all its glory, and that's exactly what Dawn let us do, from his arrival in 2011.
"All of Vesta's images were super cool," Kristina Larson, systems engineer for NASA's mission, told Space.com. He started working at Dawn as an undergraduate summer intern and gradually assumed more and more responsibility with the spacecraft, and the first command he sent to her brought some of those images to Earth. "Vesta is a body that looks so funky, it's not very spherical and it's very cratered."
De Vesta funky look It is also scientifically interesting: he experienced two crater events so large that the crashes created a network of more than 90 cuts. "The whole body similar to a planet reverberated," Rayman said. During the time of Dawn in Vesta, he said that day after day he was impressed by the success of the mission and the degree of success. scientists He took the visit. "I always felt that if the spacecraft died mysteriously that day, we would at least have a valuable return on what we had invested."
The spacecraft had a near-death experience when it left Vesta, when it broke the second of the four reaction wheels it used to maneuver, which endangered Dawn's ability to send data home. The team's engineers rushed to find a solution to replace the fuel maneuvers, which saved the mission.
In 2015, Dawn reached its second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres. Here, his discoveries include particularly reflective regions now bent bright spots, which scientists now believe represent sprayed salts on the surface of Ceres from below. But for Rayman, they are also impressive. "How can you not be hypnotized by these things?" he said. "What I like is to think that it is as if Ceres were casting her light like a beacon that illuminates its light through the interplanetary ocean."
Dawn also revealed that Ceres is not a dead world; just 250 million years ago, a giant volcano of ice called Ahuna Mons gushed liquid water, with dozens more compatriots, making the composition and geology of the dwarf planet a particularly complex puzzle. "It's a kind of hybrid world," Lynnae Quick, a planetary scientist at the National Air and Space Museum who works with Dawn, told Space.com. "Because Ceres has this kind of exotic composition, you can not just think about water and salts, you have to think about water, salts and mud, and that makes it quite interesting."
As the ship has little closer - when it ran out of fuel, it slid 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the surface of the dwarf planet - its views of Ceres have only become more incredible. The sunrise hour in Ceres has Reformed views of scientists of the object, said team members, and is now a viable candidate for a return mission. In large part, that is due to the boxes that the scientists marked in their life search criteria.
"Before, it was just an asteroid, and now it plays with the big ones," Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at NASA's mission, told Space.com, referring to places like Saturn's moon Enceladus and Europa's moon. Jupiter. who have been astrobiological contenders for much longer. To protect any life that may be hidden in Ceres, the disappearance of the spacecraft is carefully arranged to keep it away from the dwarf planet for at least 20 years, in case NASA decides to build a tracking mission.
NASA is already working on a successor to the $ 467 million Dawn mission: Psyche. Like Dawn, he will visit an asteroid, and like Dawn, he will do so thanks to an ion propulsion system. And the scientists behind Dawn hope they have paved the way for more excursions to small corners of our solar system.
"I hope there are many, many missions like [Dawn] Next, "Carol Raymond, the principal investigator of the mission at NASA, told Space.com." We have a new way of exploring the solar system and going to smaller objects, which maybe were not appreciated in the past because of how much information they have. "
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario