ScienceNow: Ooh, this is going to be good. Asteroid Vesta’s new mechanical moon getting close, taking pictures
A few reporters have been paying attention, but not many, to the upcoming visit to the asteroid Vesta by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. That number may pick up a bit now. At AAAS-Science Mag’s ScienceNOW site, in the ScienceShots category ( and that’s a lot of employment of the word science) resolute space and planet writer Richard A. Kerr has a big picture and a small story that passes as a fat caption. It’s a good appetizer for the main event, starting later today with a maneuver into orbit.
He has a few things to say about the swirly ridges and the near lack of craters. the machine’s full-bore high-res imaging will take a month or so to get going, one learns at AP from another resolute space and planet writer, Alicia Chang.
There’s a fair amount of such advance coverage. No sense of a long roundup until the data flow is a flood. I for one am grateful for the curtainraisers – I try to keep up on such things but I still had tucked away the Dawn mission in the category of things that will happen at some distant date. Vesta is a big asteroid, but Dawn’s next date is with a giant of the type, Ceres, a sphere so big (950 km wide, nearly twice Vesta) it sits with suchlike as Pluto on the list of dwarf planets.
Grist for the Mill: NASA-JPL Dawn Mission ; Press Release ;
