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The Dawn Mission is a NASA mission that will send the Dawn spacecraft, a robotic space probe, to the asteroid belt.
Dawn will orbit and examine the two most massive members of the asteroid belt, the dwarf planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta. Dawn will be the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around two different planetary bodies other than the Earth and Moon, and the first to visit the largest asteroid. Launch is scheduled for September 26, 2007.
(klick to enlarge) The mission's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formation.
Ceres and Vesta have many contrasting characteristics that are thought to have resulted from them forming in two different regions of the early solar system; Ceres is theorized to have experienced a "cool and wet" formation that may have left it with subsurface water, and Vesta is theorized to have experienced a "hot and dry" formation that resulted in a differentiated interior and surface vulcanism.
Dawn Spaceprobe is liftet on to the upperstage Dawns second Solar Panel Dawn is powered by: NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT),its an novel Ionic-Engine! The
Xenon Tank
