Dawn Discovery mission to Vesta and Ceres: Present status

Dawn, the ninth Discovery mission, is a journey to the main belt asteroids Vesta and Ceres to attempt to understand the building blocks of the solar system and the processes occurring at the solar system’s earliest epoch. It does this with a spacecraft that utilizes ion propulsion to reach its targets and to maneuver into orbit about these bodies. It carries a framing camera, a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, and a gamma ray and neutron detector. The mission has passed its critical design review and is scheduled to be launched in June 2006 with arrival at Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015.