Dawn Mission

[Tim]

I'm not sure if any of you have been following this or not, but NASA's Dawn spaceship, launched September 27th 2007,
has established orbit around Vesta, the second most massive object in the asteroid belt.
It has a diameter of 530 kilometres (330 mi) and was discovered in 1807.
The absolute best picture we were able to obtain before the dawn mission was from the Hubble Space telescope (seen below).

As the dawn spacecraft got closer, we were able to get better pictures.
This picture was taken May 3rd, 2011 at a distance of 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles)

This picture was taken on June 14, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 165,000 miles (265,000 kilometers)

This picture was taken on July 1, 2011. It was taken from a distance of about 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers

And today the dawn spacecraft is in orbit around the asteroid sending back pictures like this

To see many more pictures or to read all about the mission, go here to the site
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

 

[Codrus]

repped :thumbup

 

[Tim]

Here are a couple of more shots taken in the last day or two

 

[HK]

I have a picture of a poppadom in black and white that looks just like that :ninja

 

[Tim]

I bet yours tastes soo much better...

 

[BadBoy]

Pretty sweet, but what does it tell us? We have rocks floating around in space hundreds of thousands of miles away? I guess it proves we can take better pics of rocks that far away

I still like it though! Thanks for the pics!

 

[Tim]

4 Vesta is only the first stop of many. There is so much we don't know about our own solar system and this mission is giving us a lot of incite.

 

[Dana]

wow...