User:Serendipodous/indigo/page 18

belt

 * Inner: S, M, E
 * Mid: F, G, P. T (lesser degrees of heating, water evaporation, clay creation)
 * Outer: C, D, P (too cold for water modification, primordial)

2006
While they seem to have formed at very similar distances from the nascent Sun, and thus, one might expect, under similar conditions, observations from distant Earth show these two bodies to be very different from each other. Water seems to have played an important role in Ceres’ history, and there is reason to believe it might still harbor a substantial inventory of that precious commodity, never having been hot enough to drive the water away. Vesta, in contrast, displays the signatures of minerals found in lava, indicating that different forces shaped its history.

Ceres, which by itself contains one quarter of all the mass in the asteroid belt, is about 975 km (605 miles) in diameter. The only states in the United States that are larger are Texas and Alaska.

Ceres’ surface is as large as Alaska plus Texas plus California. In fact, it is about one third of the area of the United States, and almost 40% of the area of the contiguous United States.

Ion propulsion is also what allowed NASA to shift Dawn’s launch date from its original plan of 2006 to 2007 without having to change the plans for the rich scientific investigations to be conducted.

With the extraordinary maneuvering capability of its ion propulsion system, Dawn could conduct its planned mission with a launch any time from May 2006 (or perhaps much earlier) to November 2007.

A year of tests on top of tests on top of simulations. Baking in a vacuum chamber to remove contaminants (baking out- two days att 95 C). Checks on top of checks.

problems ranging from incomplete solder connections on a microchip or a broken wire, to software bugs, to unexpected interactions between subsystems that must work together.

Each power processing unit will process up to 2500 watts (much more than the average house consumes),

As readers in other solar systems have no doubt followed with some detached amusement, the definition of “planet” was in the news in this solar system this summer.

All scientific evidence indicates that with all the names humans have applied to them, including planets, asteroids, minor planets, protoplanets, and dwarf planets, they have steadfastly remained above the controversy, leading their stately lives without apparent interest.

400 thousand lines of code- about as much as the Quake 3 engine, or the amount used in the entire Space Shuttle.

Nearly every component of the spacecraft had a duplicate to ensure redundancy.

ionizing xenon gas; that is, it gives it a small positive electrical charge by removing a negatively charged electron from each neutral xenon atom. Once the xenon is ionized, the subsystem can electrically accelerate the ions and emit them at very high speed from any 1 of the 3 ion thrusters. The action of each xenon ion as it is shot from a thruster at up to 40 kilometers per second (89,000 miles per hour)

34-meter (112-foot) or 70-meter (230-foot) antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) in California, Spain, and eastern Australia. While Dawn is returning scientific data from Ceres at maximum range, the 100-watt radio signal it transmits, after traversing the vast distance to Earth, will be less than one tenth of one millionth of one billionth of a watt when it is received by a 34-meter antenna. If this energy were collected for the age of the universe, it would be enough to illuminate a refrigerator light bulb for 1 second, yet it is sufficient to carry all the images and other rich scientific data to Earth.

All else being equal, for the same amount of propellant, a spacecraft equipped with ion propulsion can achieve 10 times the speed of a craft outfitted with normal propulsion, or a spacecraft with ion propulsion can carry far less propellant to accomplish the same job as a spacecraft using more standard propulsion.

The main engine on some interplanetary spacecraft may provide about 10,000 times greater thrust but, of course, such systems are so fuel-hungry that their ultimate speed is more limited.

such a maneuver might be about 1000 meters/second (2200 miles/hour) and could consume about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of propellants. With its ion propulsion system, Dawn could accomplish the same change in speed with less than 30 kilograms of xenon. A typical Mars mission might complete its maneuver in less than 25 minutes, while Dawn might require more than 3 months.

2007
Dawn conducted its "hot fire test" on Valentines day.

Dawn is so much more capable of its own maneuvering, that it relies on the rocket only to propel it away from Earth. Once its journey has begun, it steers its own course. By thrusting gently but persistently for years, Dawn constantly reshapes its orbit around the Sun. The flight profile -- the direction and timing of the thrusting -- is calculated to smoothly sculpt Dawn’s orbit, gradually changing the trajectory so that it is identical to that of its quarry. With its amazingly low rate of fuel consumption, Dawn will spend most of its mission with a light touch on the accelerator.

Dawn will approach each target very slowly because, under the influence of its IPS, its orbit around the Sun will slowly take the required shape. Instead of veering and swerving, Dawn’s maneuvering will be characterized more by grace and delicacy. As it creeps up on an asteroid, it will slip into orbit so gently that a casual observer would not even notice the transition.

The secret of ion propulsion however is that it can accelerate the spacecraft for months or years, eventually yielding much greater changes in speed than can be achieved with chemical propulsion.

weight of a piece of paper

It will arrive at the dwarf planet (the first spacecraft to visit one) in 2015 to perform detailed studies of that world.

the two wings, each the width of a singles tennis court, were attached to the spacecraft was December. Each wing consists of 5 panels, and hinges allow the system to be folded for launch, so the spacecraft can fit comfortably in the rocket’s nose cone

Dawn's ion drive gave it a far more flexible launch period than chemical spacecraft, but a delay to October would shift the alignment of the asteroids and the Earth so far that it would be years before the mission could begin.

The Delta rocket does not account for the changing position of the launch pad in space as Earth rotates, so a launch delay would place the spacecraft on a different trajectory. Most interplanetary missions have launch windows of only 1 second because they have too little maneuvering capability to compensate for the altered trajectory of the rocket. Dawn's ion propulsion system gives it much greater flexibility, so its launch window on September 27 was 29 minutes long.

2009
Mars to shooting an arrow at a target 47 kilometers (29 miles) away. The objective was to hit a small region just outside the 30-centimeter (1-foot) red bull’s-eye.

2011
Vesta A cosmic ray likely fried one of the wires, meaning a valve controlling a thruster died

The largest object between the Earth and Pluto not yet visited by a probe.

Farther from Earth and from the sun than it has ever been, Dawn is on course and on schedule for its March 2015 arrival at Ceres, an enigmatic world of rock and ice. To slip gracefully into orbit around the dwarf planet, the spacecraft has been using its uniquely capable departing the giant protoplanet Vesta in Sep. 2012, the stalwart ship has accomplished 99.46 percent of the planned ion thrusting.

What matters most for this daring mission is its ambitious exploration of two uncharted worlds (previews of the Ceres plan were presented from December 2013 to August 2014), but this month and next, we will consider that 0.54 percent of the thrusting Dawn did not accomplish. We begin by seeing what happened on the spacecraft and in mission control. In November we will describe the implications for the approach phase of the mission. (To skip now to some highlights of the new approach schedule, click on the word "click.")

The story begins with radiation, which fills space. Earth's magnetic field deflects much of it, and the atmosphere absorbs much of the rest, but there is no such protection for interplanetary spacecraft. Some particles were energized as recently as a few days earlier on the sun or uncounted millennia ago at a supernova far away in the Milky Way galaxy. Regardless of when and where it started, one particle's cosmic journey ended on Sep. 11 at 2:27 a.m. PDT inside Earth's robotic ambassador to the main asteroid belt. The particle penetrated one of the spacecraft panels and struck an electrical component in a unit that controls the ion propulsion system.

At the time the burst of radiation arrived, Dawn was thrusting as usual, emitting a blue-green beam of high velocity xenon ions from engine #1. Ten times as efficient as conventional chemical propulsion, ion propulsion truly enables this unique mission to orbit two extraterrestrial destinations. With its remarkably gentle thrust, it uses xenon propellant so frugally that it takes more than three and a half days to expend just one pound (0.45 kilograms), providing acceleration with patience.

Dawn's electronics were designed to be resistant to radiation. On this occasion, however, the particle managed to deposit its energy in such a way that it disrupted the behavior of a circuit. The control unit used that circuit to move valves in the elaborate system that transports xenon from the main tank at a pressure of 500 psi (34 times atmospheric pressure) to the ion engine, where it is regulated to around two millionths of a psi (ten million times lower than atmospheric pressure), yielding the parsimonious expenditure of propellant. The controller continued monitoring the xenon flow (along with myriad other parameters needed for the operation of the ion engine), but the valves were unable to move in response to its instructions. Thrusting continued normally for more than an hour as the xenon pressure in the engine decreased very gradually. (Everything with ion propulsion is gradual!) When it reached the minimum acceptable value, the controller executed an orderly termination of thrust and reported its status to the main spacecraft computer.

When the computer was informed that thrust had stopped, it invoked one of Dawn's safe modes. It halted other activities, reconfigured some of the subsystems and rotated to point the main antenna to Earth.

The events to that point were virtually identical to a radiation strike that occurred more than three years earlier. Subsequent events, however, unfolded differently.

In normal circumstances, the mission control team would be able to guide the spacecraft back to normal operations in a matter of hours, as they did in 2011. Indeed, the longest part of the entire process then was simply the time between when Dawn turned to Earth and when the next scheduled tracking session with NASA's worldwide Deep Space Network (DSN) began. Most of the time, Dawn operates on its own using instructions stored in its computer by mission controllers. The DSN is scheduled to communicate with it only at certain times.

Dawn performs a carefully choreographed 2.5-year pas de trois from Vesta to Ceres. Celestial navigators had long known that the trajectory was particularly sensitive to glitches that interfere with ion thrusting during part of 2014. To ensure a prompt response to any interruptions in thrust, therefore, the Dawn project collaborated with the DSN to devise a new method of checking in on the spacecraft more frequently (but for short periods) to verify its health. This strategy helped them detect the condition soon after it occurred.Dawn from Vesta to Ceres

When an antenna at the DSN complex near Madrid, Spain, received the explorer's radio signal that morning, it was apparent that Dawn was neither in exactly the configuration to be expected if it were thrusting nor if it had entered one of its safe modes. Although they did not establish until later in the day what was happening, it turns out that not one but two anomalies occurred on the distant spacecraft, likely both triggered by particles in the radiation burst. Dawn encountered difficulty controlling its attitude with its usual exquisite precision. (Engineers use "attitude" to refer to the orientation of the craft in the zero-gravity conditions of spaceflight. In this case, the spacecraft's orientation was not controlled with its usual precision, but the spacecraft's outlook was as positive and its demeanor as pleasant as ever.) Instead of maintaining a tight lock of its main antenna on faraway Earth, it was drifting very slightly. The rate was 10 times slower than the hour hand on a clock, but that was enough to affect the interplanetary communication. Ultimately one of the onboard systems designed to monitor the overall health and performance of all subsystems detected the attitude discrepancy and called for another, deeper safe mode.

In this safe mode, Dawn further reconfigured some of the subsystems and used a different part of the attitude control system to aim at the solar system's most salient landmark: the sun. It switched to one of its auxiliary antennas and transmitted a wide radio beam.

Meanwhile, the operations team began working with the DSN and other missions to arrange for more time to communicate with Dawn than had previously been scheduled. Projects often collaborate this way, making adjustments for each other in the spirit of shared interest in exploring the solar system with the limited number of DSN stations. Later in the day on Thursday, when an antenna near Goldstone, Calif., was made available to point at Dawn, it was stable in safe mode.

The team decided to aim for resuming thrusting on Monday, Sep. 15. They had already formulated a detailed four-week sequence of commands to transmit to the spacecraft then, so this would avoid the significant complexity of changing the timing, a process that in itself can be time-consuming. This plan would limit the duration of the missed thrust during this sensitive portion of the long flight from Vesta to Ceres. Time was precious.

While it was in safe mode, there were several major challenges in investigating why the spacecraft had not been able to point accurately. The weak radio signal from the auxiliary antenna allowed it to send only a trickle of data. Readers who have heard tales of life late in the 20th century can only imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors with their primitive connections to the Internet. Now imagine the Dawn team trying to diagnose a very subtle drift in attitude that had occurred on a spacecraft 3.2 AU (almost 300 million miles, or 480 million kilometers) from Earth with a connection about one thousand times slower than a dial-up modem from 20 years ago. In addition, radio signals (which all regular readers know travel at the universal limit of the speed of light) took 53 minutes to make the round trip. Therefore, every instruction transmitted from JPL required a long wait for a response. Combined with the intermittent DSN schedule, these conditions greatly limited the pace at which operations could proceed.

To improve the efficiency of the recovery, the DSN agreed to use its newest antenna, known as Deep Space Station 35 (DSS-35), near Canberra, Australia. DSS-35 was not quite ready yet for full-time operational use, and the DSN postponed some of the planned work on it to give Dawn some very valuable extra communications opportunities. It's impressive how all elements of NASA work together to make each project successful.DSN with cranes

Engineers hypothesized that the reconfigurations upon entering safe mode might have rectified the anomaly that prevented the spacecraft from maintaining its characteristic stability. While some people continued the previously planned work of finalizing preparations for Ceres, most of the rest of the operations team split into two shifts. That way, they could progress more quickly through the many steps necessary to command the spacecraft out of safe mode to point the main antenna to Earth again so they could download the large volume of detailed data it had stored on what had occurred. By the time they were ready late on Friday night, however, there was a clear indication that the spacecraft was not ready. Telemetry revealed that the part of the attitude control software that was not used when pointing at the sun in safe mode - but that would be engaged when pointing elsewhere - was still not operating correctly.

Experts at JPL, along with a colleague at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, VA, scrutinized what telemetry they could receive, performed tests with the spacecraft simulator, and conducted other investigations. The team devised possible explanations, and one by one they tested and eliminated them. Their intensive efforts were powered not only by their skill and their collective experience on Dawn and other missions but also by plenty of pizza and fancy cupcakes. (The cupcakes were delivered in a box lovingly decorated with a big heart, ostensibly by the young daughter of the team member who provided them, but this writer suspects it might have been the team member himself. Regardless, embedded in the action, your correspondent established that the cupcakes were not only a yummy dessert after a pizza lunch but also that they made a terrific dinner. What a versatile and delectable comestible!)

Despite having all the expertise and creativity that could be brought to bear, by Saturday afternoon nothing they had tried had proven effective, including restarting the part of the software that seemed to be implicated in the pointing misbehavior. Confronting such an unyielding situation was not typical for such an experienced flight team. Whenever Dawn had entered one of its safe modes in the preceding seven years of flight, they had usually established the cause within a very few hours and knew precisely how to return to normal operations quickly. This time was different.

The team had still more ideas for systematically trying to fix the uncooperative pointing, but with the clock ticking, the mission director/chief engineer, with a conviction that can only come from cupcakes, decided to pursue a more dramatic course. It would put the spacecraft into an even deeper safe mode, and hence would guarantee a longer time to restore it to its normal operational configuration, but it also seemed a more likely solution. It thus appeared to offer the best possibility of being ready to start thrusting on schedule on Monday, avoiding the difficulty of modifying the four-week sequence of commands and minimizing the period of lost thrust. The idea sounds simple: reboot the main computer.

Rebooting the computer on a ship in deep space is a little bigger deal than rebooting your laptop. Indeed, the last time controllers commanded Dawn to restart its computer was in April 2011, when they installed a new version of software. Such a procedure is very delicate and is not undertaken lightly, given that the computer controls all of the robot's functions in the unforgiving depths of space. Nevertheless, the team made all the preparations that afternoon and evening, and the computer rebooted as commanded two minutes after midnight.

Engineers immediately set about the intricate tasks of verifying that the probe correctly reloaded all of its complex software and was still healthy. It took another 12 hours of reconfiguring the spacecraft and watching the driblet of data before they could confirm around noon on Sunday that the attitude control software was back to its usual excellent performance. Whatever had afflicted it since the radiation burst was now cured. After a brief pause for the tired team members on shift in Dawn mission control to shout things like "Yes!" "Hurray!" and "Time for more cupcakes!" they continued with the complex commanding to point the main antenna to Earth, read out the diagnostic logs, and return each subsystem to its intended state. By Monday afternoon, they had confirmed that hundreds upon hundreds of measurements from the spacecraft were exactly what they needed to be. Dawn was ready to resume ion thrusting, heading for an exciting, extended exploration of the first dwarf planet discovered.

Throughout the contingency operations, even as some people on the team delved into diagnosing and recovering the spacecraft and others continued preparing for Ceres, still others investigated how the few days of unplanned coasting would affect the trajectory. For a mission using ion propulsion, thrusting at any time is affected by thrusting at all other times, in both the past and the future. The new thrust profiles (specifically, both the throttle level and the direction to point the ion engine every second) for the remainder of the cruise phase and the approach phase (concluding with entering the first observation orbit, known as RC3) would have to compensate for the coasting that occurred when thrusting had been scheduled. The flight plans are very complicated, and developing them requires experts who apply very sophisticated software and a touch of artistry. As soon as the interruption in thrust was detected on Thursday, the team began formulating new designs. Initially most of the work assumed thrusting would start on Monday. After the first few attempts to correct the attitude anomaly were unsuccessful, however, they began looking more carefully into later dates. Thanks to the tremendous flexibility of ion propulsion, there was never doubt about ultimately getting into orbit around Ceres, but the thrust profiles and the nature and timeline of the approach phase could change quite a bit.

Once controllers observed that the reboot had resolved the problem, they put the finishing touches on the Monday plan. The team combined the new thrust profile with the pre-existing four-week set of commands already scheduled to be radioed to the spacecraft during a DSN session on Monday. They had already made another change as well. When the radiation burst struck the probe, it had been using ion engine #1, ion engine controller #1, and power unit #1. Although they were confident that simply turning the controller off and then on again would clear the glitch, just as it had in 2011 (and as detailed analysis of the electrical circuitry had indicated), they had decided a few days earlier that there likely would not be time to verify it, so prudence dictated that near-term thrusting not rely on it. Therefore, following the same strategy used three years earlier, the new thrust profile was based on controller #2, which meant it needed to use ion engine #2 and power unit #2. (For those of you keeping score, engine #3 can work with either controller and either power unit, but the standard combination so far has been to use the #1 devices with engine #3.) Each engine, controller, and power unit has been used extensively in the mission, and the expedition now could be completed with only one of each component if need be.

By the time Dawn was once again perched atop its blue-green pillar of xenon ions on Monday, it had missed about 95 hours of thrusting. That has surprising and interesting consequences for the approach to Ceres early next year, and it provides a fascinating illustration of the creativity of trajectory designers and the powerful capability of ion propulsion. Given how long this log is already, however, we will present the details of the new approach phase next month and explain then how it differs from what we described last December. For those readers whose 2015 social calendars are already filling up, however, we summarize here some of the highlights.

Throughout this year, the flight team has made incremental improvements in the thrust plan, and gradually the Ceres arrival date has shifted earlier by several weeks from what had been anticipated a year ago. Today Dawn is on course for easing into Ceres' gravitational embrace on March 6. The principal effect of the missed thrust is to make the initial orbit larger, so the spaceship will need more time to gently adjust its orbit to RC3 at 8,400 miles (13,500 kilometers). It will reach that altitude on about April 22 which, as it turns out, differs by less than a week from the schedule last year.Hubble images of Ceres

During the approach phase, the spacecraft will interrupt thrusting occasionally to take pictures of Ceres against the background stars, principally to aid in navigating the ship to the uncharted shore ahead. Because arrival has advanced from what we presented 10 months ago, the schedule for imaging has advanced as well. The first "optical navigation" photos will be taken on about Jan. 13. (As we will see next month, Dawn will glimpse Ceres once even sooner than that, but not for navigation purposes.) The onboard camera, designed for mapping Vesta and Ceres from orbit, will show a fuzzy orb about 25 pixels across. Although the pictures will not yet display details quite as fine as those already discerned by Hubble Space Telescope, the different perspective will be intriguing and may contain surprises. The pictures from the second approach imaging session on Jan. 26 will be slightly better than Hubble's, and when the third set is acquired on Feb. 4, they should be about twice as good as what we have today. By the time of the second "rotation characterization" on about Feb. 20 (nearly a month earlier than was planned last year), the pictures will be seven times better than Hubble's.

While the primary purpose of the approach photos is to help guide Dawn to its orbital destination, the images (and visible and infrared spectra collected simultaneously) will serve other purposes. They will provide some early characterizations of the alien world so engineers and scientists can finalize sensor parameters to be used for the many RC3 observations. They will also be used to search for moons. And the pictures surely will thrill everyone along for the ride (including you, loyal reader), as a mysterious fuzzy patch of light, observed from afar for more than two centuries and once called a planet, then an asteroid and now a dwarf planet, finally comes into sharper focus. Wonderfully exciting though they will be, the views will tantalize us, whetting our appetites for more. They will draw us onward with their promises of still more discoveries ahead, as this bold adventure into the unknown begins to reveal the treasures we have so long sought.

2014
Dawn had to correct its inclination as asteroids do not follow the ecliptic closely

The ion drive allowed Dawn to very gradually fall in step with Vesta's orbit, and then very gradually, fall instep with Ceres orbit. It used its ion drive, and then Ceres's gravity, to pull itself into orbit.

There are dozens of phyllosilicates on Earth (one well known group is mica).

By electrically changing the speed at which these gyroscope-like devices rotate, the probe can control its orientation, stabilizing itself or turning. We have discussed their lamentable history on Dawn extensively, with two of the four having failed. Although such losses could have been ruinous, the flight team formulated and implemented very clever strategies to complete the mission without the wheels. Exceeding their own expectations in such a serious situation, Dawn is accomplishing even more observations at Ceres than had been planned when it was being built or when it embarked on its ambitious interplanetary journey in 2007.

2 wheels plus hydrozine

The Dawn project worked with the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to formalize a plan for names on Ceres that builds upon and broadens Piazzi’s theme. Craters will be named for gods and goddesses of agriculture and vegetation from world mythology. Other features will be named for agricultural festivals.

"Even as Dawn approached Ceres, the mysterious reflections shone out far into space, mesmerizing and irresistible, as if to guide or even seduce a passing ship into going closer."

2015
Scientists' best explanation now for the deposits of salt is that when asteroids crash into Ceres, they excavate underground briny water-ice. Once on the surface and exposed to the vacuum of space, even in the freezing cold so far from the sun, the ice sublimes, the water molecules going directly from the solid ice to gas without an intermediate liquid stage. Left behind are the materials that had been dissolved in the water. The size and brightness of the different regions depend in part on how long ago the impact occurred. A very preliminary estimate is that Occator was formed by a powerful collision around 80 million years ago, which is relatively recent in geological times. But once a crater is formed, the scar might be expected to heal as the misshapen ground gradually recovers. In some ways this is similar to when you remove pressure from your skin. What may be a deep impression relaxes, and after a while, the original mark (or, one may hope, Marc) is gone. But Ceres has more craters than some scientists had anticipated, especially at low latitudes where sunlight provides a faint warming. Apparently the expectation of the gradual disappearance of craters was not quite right. Is there less evidence of flowing ground material because the temperature is lower than predicted (causing the flow to be even slower), because the composition is not quite what was assumed, or because of other reasons? Moreover, craters are not distributed as would be expected for random pummeling; some regions display significantly more craters than others. Investigating this heterogeneity may give further insight into the geological processes that have taken place and are occurring now on this dwarf planet.

it detected high energy electrons in the same region of space above Ceres on three consecutive orbits. Electrons and other subatomic particles stream outward from the sun in what is called the solar wind, and researchers understand how planets with magnetic fields can accelerate them to higher energy. Earth is an example of a planet with a magnetic field, but Ceres is thought not to be.

By the end of each mapping cycle, the probe had accumulated so much data that it fixed its antenna on Earth for about two days, or 2.5 revolutions, to send its detailed reports on Ceres to eager Earthlings.

mission will end when the hydrazine runs out

Ion propulsion allowed for course correction to correct for unforseen events such as glitches

A crater can form from such a powerful punch that the hard ground practically melts and flows away from the impact site. Then the material rebounds, almost as if it sloshes back, while already cooling and then solidifying again. The central peak is like a snapshot, preserving a violent moment in the formation of the crater. By correlating the presence or absence of central peaks with the sizes of the craters, scientists can infer properties of Ceres' crust, such as how strong it is. Rather than a peak at the center, some craters contain large pits, depressions that may be a result of gasses escaping after the impact. (Craters elsewhere in the solar system, including on Vesta and Mars, also have pits.)

Part of the flexibility built into the plans was to measure Ceres’ gravity field as accurately as possible in each mapping orbit and use that knowledge to refine the design for the subsequent orbital phase.

Before Dawn, scientists had estimated Ceres' mass to be 1.04 billion billion tons (947 billion billion kilograms). Now it is measured to be 1.03 billion billion tons (939 billion billion kilograms), well within the previous margin of error. It is an impressive demonstration of the success of science that astronomers had been able to determine the heft of that point of light so accurately.

careful husbanding of hydrazine

At an average altitude of only 240 miles (385 kilometers), the spacecraft is closer to Ceres than the International Space Station is to Earth.

With the spacecraft this close to the ground, it can measure two kinds of nuclear radiation that come from as much as a yard (meter) deep. The radiation carries the signatures of the atoms there, allowing scientists to inventory some of the key chemical elements of geological interest.

Some of the gamma rays are produced by radioactive elements, but most of them and the neutrons are generated as byproducts of cosmic rays impinging on Ceres.

at Ceres' present distance from the sun, it would have been too warm for ammonia to be caught up in the planet-forming process, just as it was even closer to the sun where Earth resides. There are at least two possible explanations for how Ceres acquired its large inventory of ammonia. One is that it formed much farther from the sun, perhaps even beyond Neptune, where conditions were cool enough for ammonia to condense. In that case, it could easily have incorporated ammonia. Subsequent gravitational jostling among the new residents of the solar system could have propelled Ceres into its present orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Another possibility is that Ceres formed closer to where it is now but that debris containing ammonia from the outer solar system drifted inward and some of it ultimately fell onto the dwarf planet. If enough made its way to Ceres, the ground would be covered with the chemical, just as VIR observed.

2016
Feb: completed all mission objectives

Only orbiter not to have been preceded by a flyby.

5.5 years: 39,600 kilometers per hour change in speed. Over double the prevous record, which was the prototype ion drive Deep Space 1. And nearly as much as the rocket that launched it.

They also were keenly aware that the mission could very well conclude after three months of low altitude operations, with Dawn using up the last of its hydrazine. But their efforts since then to conserve hydrazine proved very effective. In addition, the two remaining wheels have been operating well since they were powered on in December, further reducing the consumption of the precious propellant. And in one place (so far) on Ceres, this spectrometer has directly observed water, not below the surface but on the ground. The infrared signature shows up in a small crater named Oxo. (For the pronunciation, listen to the animation below.) As with the neutron spectra, it is too soon to know whether the water is in the form of ice or is chemically bound up in minerals. GRaND shows Ceres is rich in hydrogen. Moreover, it detects more neutrons in an important energy range near the equator than near the poles, likely indicating there is more hydrogen, and hence more (frozen) water, in the ground at the high latitudes. Although Ceres is farther from the sun than Earth, and you would not consider it balmy there, it still receives some warmth. Just as at Earth, the sun's heating is less effective closer to the poles than at low latitudes, so this distribution of ice in the ground may reflect the temperature differences. Where it is warmer, ice close to the surface would have sublimed more quickly, thus depleting the inventory compared to the cooler ground far to the north or south. While the crater is estimated to be a geological youngster at 80 million years old, that is an extremely long time for the material to remain so reflective. Exposed for so long to cosmic radiation and pelting from the rain of debris from space, it should have darkened. Scientists don't know (yet) what physical process are responsible, but perhaps it was replenished long after the crater itself formed, with more water, carrying dissolved salts, finding its way to the surface. As their analyses of the photos and spectra continue, scientists will gain a clearer picture and be able to answer this and other questions. One of the major objectives of the mission was to photograph 80 percent of Ceres' vast landscape with a resolution of 660 feet (200 meters) per pixel. That would provide 150 times the clarity of the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. Dawn has now photographed 99.8 percent with a resolution of 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel.

2010 and 2012, internal wheels ceased functioning. Hydrazine used instead, not intended for use, must be conserved.

2017
Dawn takes more than a week to revolve around Ceres, but Ceres turns on its axis in just nine hours. Because Dawn moves through only a small segment of its orbit in one Cerean day, it is almost as if the spacecraft hovers in place as the dwarf planet pirouettes beneath it.

In April 2017, Dawn lost its third reaction wheel

Heat flows from hot (far underground) to cold (the surface, which is exposed to space). It is at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) colder near Ceres’ north and south poles than near the equator. That means the strength of the geological pressure pushing minerals to the surface should depend on the latitude, which would translate into different compositions at different latitudes. But that is not what Dawn sees. The minerals show up everywhere we look. Their prevalence is a fact that is inconsistent with a deep underground origin followed by a heat-driven movement to the surface. Science tells us we need to formulate a different explanation for why minerals produced in water under high pressure now can be found on the ground.

Scientists recognize a more likely explanation. The minerals may have formed in an ocean early in Ceres’ history, when radioactive elements were so abundant that it would have been warm enough to keep a large volume of water as a liquid. But as Ceres aged, it would have cooled (perhaps some readers have experienced this as well), because the supply of radioactive elements would have gradually been depleted as they decayed. Almost the entire ocean would have frozen, encasing Ceres in a shell of ice. But that wouldn’t be the end of the story.

Ice cannot last long on Ceres (except in special places). Cold though it is on that world, there is enough warmth from the distant sun that ice sublimates, turning from a solid into a gas as the water molecules escape into space. Even as that gradual phenomenon occurred at the microscopic level, ice was lost through a much more dramatic and abrupt process. It was blasted away by asteroids that slammed into it. The rain of rocks that fall onto Ceres over millions of years is a familiar hazard to anyone who has lived in the main asteroid belt for millions of years. In fact, scientists estimate that a frozen ocean three miles (five kilometers) thick could have been lost in only a few tens of millions of years, a blink in geological time. (And even if that ice shell had been much thicker, it would still have been lost on a geologically short timescale.)