Cav's Place

I seem to be writing a fair bit about space exploration lately, but there is good reason for that, as plenty of notable things are happening in that field. Some of them are worrying or even downright terrible, but more about that in the next post on the topic, assuming I’ll manage to stick to the plan and actually write it next week. Today we had confirmation of another positive development, so that’s what the focus of this post needs to be.
I’m obviously talking about Dawn successfully entering orbit around Vesta. This was scheduled for around 5:00 AM GMT on July 16, but the spacecraft design and positioning did not allow for communications at that time, so data confirming the success of the orbital insertion maneuver was only received early this morning GMT, when Dawn was scheduled to orient itself in such a manner as to allow sending back data. The exact time of orbital insertion is not yet known, as it depends on Vesta’s gravity, which is currently only estimated, exact measurements needing to be performed by Dawn in the coming days.

We’re talking about a mission that was canceled, reinstated, put on hold, canceled a second time and then also reinstated a second time before finally being ready for launch. Then the launch itself was delayed several times, for a total of more than three months from the original schedule, during which time a small accident also caused slight damage to one of the spacecraft’s solar panels. Despite it all, there it is now, close to four years after launch, finally in orbit around its first target and ready to send back the data it was built to gather.
The mission timeline calls for a year spent orbiting Vesta, followed by a departure towards Ceres, which it should start orbiting in early 2015. It is currently the first spacecraft to closely study Vesta and, assuming everything will work according to plan, it will also become the first spacecraft to study Ceres. As a result, it will also be the first to actually orbit two different bodies and the first to closely study a dwarf planet, being scheduled to reach Ceres five months before New Horizons will reach Pluto.

With observations only starting, there is little else to say about this particular mission at the moment. I can only hope that such successes will somehow make the powers that be reverse the current trend and pay more attention to space exploration in the future. If, despite a political, social and economic climate that’s not only not favorable, but often downright hostile, to such projects, we can now have MESSENGER orbiting Mercury, Venus Express orbiting Venus, LRO orbiting the Moon, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and MRO orbiting Mars, Dawn orbiting Vesta and Cassini orbiting Saturn, not to mention the outstanding Opportunity still wandering around on the surface of Mars, imagine where we could be with adequate support. But this is a rant better suited for the next post on the topic of space exploration, so I’ll leave the rest of it for later.