NASA's Dawn spacecraft is borne aloft by the mighty exhalations of a
Delta II rocket, beginning
a journey of 1.7 billion miles through the inner solar system to explore
two asteroids. Liftoff commenced at 7:34 a.m. EDT on September 27. 2007, from Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Unlike typical asteroid missions of terrestrial video arcades, in which
the pilot attempts to shoot very many similar-looking asteroids and the
resultant smaller (but still similar-looking) fragments, the unmanned Dawn will
orbit two planetary bodies, asteroid Vesta and dwarf
planet Ceres, which are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Dawn is the ninth mission in NASA's Discovery Program. It is also NASA's
first purely scientific mission powered by three solar electric ion propulsion
engines. Since it has three ion engines, that puts it
one up on the Twin Ion Engine (TIE) fighters of the fictitious Galactic Empire
within the "Star Wars" speculative universe.
--NASA and SPACE.com Staff
Credit: NASA/Tony Gray & Robert Murray
