Vesta Ahoy!

Sky and Telescope Website ^ | Shweta Krishnan

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

If you were riding with NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, now cruising the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, you would see a brightening new point of light against the starry background. This is Vesta, your immediate destination.

Artist rendition of Dawn gathering spectral data from Vesta. Scientists have estimated that Dawn will enter Vesta’s gravitational field on July 16, 2011, and begin taking data when it descends to an altitude of 2700 km from the surface.

Dawn’s first image of Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, still has fewer pixels than those of it taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007. But this view and others enable engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to steer the craft into precisely the right direction for its meet-up with Vesta this summer.

Launched on Sept. 27, 2007, Dawn has been cruising through interplanetary space, gently pushed along by its ion-fueled propulsion system. It's due to brake into orbit around Vesta in mid-July and reach its lower mapping orbit in mid-August. After a year there, Dawn will work its way out of orbit and travel on to Ceres — a round, 590-mile-wide dwarf planet that probably has a rocky core and an icy surface.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Go to the link for more pictures and "the rest of the story." http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/121728609.html

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Something for APOD ping list?

[martin_fierro]

Cool (Free!) Astronomy-related Software: Please FReepmail other suggestions
	Celestia (MAC/Win/Linux): (GET THIS ONE! -- m_f) A real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
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	SETI@Home: A scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.