By Marc Rayman
As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft makes its journey to its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres, Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer, shares a monthly update on the mission’s progress.

In this graphic of Dawn’s interplanetary trajectory, the thin solid lines represent the orbits of Earth, Mars, Vesta and Ceres. After leaving Vesta, Dawn’s orbit temporarily takes it closer to the Sun than Vesta, although in this view they are so close together the difference is not visible because of the thickness of the lines. Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres at the end of its primary mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Dear Dawnscerning Readers,

Nearly three times as far from Earth as the sun is, the Dawn spacecraft is making very good progress on its ambitious trek from Vesta to Ceres. After a spectacular adventure at the second most massive resident of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Dawn used its extraordinary ion propulsion system to leave it behind and undertake the long journey to a dwarf planet.

Ceres orbits the sun outside Vesta’s orbit, yet Dawn is now closer to the sun than both of these alien worlds. How can it be that as the probe climbs from one to the other, it seems to be falling inward? Perhaps the answer lies in the text below; let’s venture on and find out!

On Halloween we discussed why Dawn is heading in toward the sun, but this question is different. Vesta also is getting closer to the sun, but what’s of interest now is that Dawn, despite its more remote destination, has been approaching the sun more quickly. That earlier log stands out as the best one ever written on this exciting mission in the entire history of October 2012, but if you prefer not to visit it now, we can summarize here the explanation for the spacecraft moving toward the sun. Like all members of the sun’s entourage, Vesta and Ceres follow elliptical orbits, their distances from the master of the solar system growing and shrinking as they loop around it. Even Earth’s orbit, although nearly round, certainly is not perfectly circular. Our planet is a little closer to the sun in the northern hemisphere winter (southern hemisphere summer) than it is in the summer (southern hemisphere winter). Dawn’s orbit is elliptical as well, so it naturally moves nearer to the sun sometimes, and now is such a time. But that does not address why it is currently closer to the sun than Vesta, even though it is seeking out the more distant Ceres.

Because it will orbit Ceres, and not simply fly past it (which would be significantly easier but less valuable), Dawn must make its own orbit around the sun be identical to its target’s. But that is not the entire story. After spending 14 months orbiting Vesta, Dawn’s challenge is more than to change the shape of its orbit to match Ceres’s. The spacecraft also must be at the same place in Ceres’s heliocentric orbit that Ceres itself is.

It would not be very rewarding to follow the same looping path around the sun but always be somewhere else on that path. You can visualize this if you have one of the many defective — er, exotic clocks from the Dawn gift shop on your planet that have two minute hands. If the clock starts with one hand pointed at 12 and another pointed at 1, they will take the same repetitive route, but neither hand will ever catch up with the other. For Dawn’s goal of exploring Ceres, this would not prove satisfying. Therefore, part of the objective of the ion thrusting is to ensure the spacecraft arrives not only on the same heliocentric course as Ceres but is there when Ceres is also.

This is a problem familiar to all readers who have maneuvered in orbit, where the principles of orbital mechanics are the rules of the road. To solve it, we rely on one of the laws that we have addressed many times in these logs: objects in a lower orbit travel faster. We described this in more detail in February, and we can recall the essential idea here. The gravitational attraction of any body, whether it is the sun, Earth, a black hole, or anything else, is greater at shorter ranges. So to balance that strong inward pull, an orbiter is compelled to race around quickly. At higher orbits, where gravity is weaker, a more leisurely orbital pace suffices.

We can take advantage of this characteristic of orbits. If we drop to a slightly lower orbit, we travel along more swiftly. That is precisely what Dawn needs to do in order to ensure that when it finishes expanding and tilting its orbit in 2015 so that it is the same as Ceres’s, it winds up at the same location as its target. This would be like speeding up the minute hand that had begun at the 12, allowing it to catch up with the hand that would otherwise always be leading it.

› Continue reading Marc Rayman’s Dawn Journal

By Julie Cooper

Each month in “Slice of History” we feature a historical photo from the JPL Archives. See more historical photos and explore the JPL Archives at https://beacon.jpl.nasa.gov/.

100 kilogauss magnet — Photograph Number 328-430Ac

An intense magnetic field facility was completed in 1964 by the Physics Section of the Space Sciences Division at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was intended for use in studying superconductors, spectroscopy and new materials, and in other experiments where a wider range of measurements was possible because of the high magnetic field. This photo shows the magnet at center. The system also included a control room, cooling tower, pumps and a heat exchanger. The generator was located in a separate room because of the noise. Water was pumped through the magnet at about 440 gallons per minute, to regulate the temperature of the large copper coil in the center of the magnet. The closed loop system contained distilled water with sodium nitrite for corrosion control.

According to a technical report about the facility, the magnetic field of the magnet and bus bars penetrated nearby rooms to a depth of about 30 feet. Any iron that could be attracted to the magnet had to be removed from the area.

This post was written for “Historical Photo of the Month,” a blog by Julie Cooper of JPL’s Library and Archives Group.

By Marc Rayman
As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft makes its journey to its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres, Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer, shares a monthly update on the mission’s progress.

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Dear Indawnstrious Readers,

In the depths of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, far from Earth, far even from any human-made object, Dawn remains in silent pursuit of dwarf planet Ceres. It has been more than six months since it slipped gracefully away from the giant protoplanet Vesta. The spacecraft has spent 95 percent of the time since then gently thrusting with its ion propulsion system, using that blue-green beam of high velocity xenon ions to propel itself from one alien world to another.

The ship set sail from Earth more than two thousand days ago, and its voyage on the celestial seas has been wonderfully rewarding. Its extensive exploration of Vesta introduced humankind to a complex and fascinating place that had only been tantalizingly glimpsed from afar with telescopes beginning with its discovery 206 years ago today. Thanks to the extraordinary capability of ion propulsion, Dawn was able to spend 14 months orbiting Vesta, observing dramatic landscapes and exotic features and collecting a wealth of measurements that scientists will continue to analyze for many years.

When it was operating close to Vesta, the spacecraft was in frequent contact with Earth. It took Dawn quite a bit of time to beam the 31,000 photos and other precious data to mission control. In addition, engineers needed to send a great many instructions to the distant adventurer to ensure it remained healthy and productive in carrying out its demanding work in the unforgiving depths of space.

Dawn is now more than 20 times farther from Vesta than the moon is from Earth. Alone again and on its long trek to Ceres, it is not necessary for the ship to be in radio contact as often. As we saw in November, the spacecraft now stops ion thrusting only once every four weeks to point its main antenna to Earth. This schedule conserves the invaluable hydrazine propellant the explorer will need at Ceres. But communicating less frequently does not mean the mission operations team is any less busy. Indeed, as we have explained before, “quiet cruise” consists of a considerable amount of activity.

Each time Dawn communicates with Earth, controllers transmit a second-by-second schedule for the subsequent four weeks. They also load a detailed flight profile with the ion throttle levels and directions for that period. It takes about three weeks to calculate and formulate these plans and to analyze, check, double check, and triple check them to ensure they are flawless before they can be radioed to Dawn.

In addition to all the usual information Dawn needs to keep flying smoothly, operators occasionally include some special instructions. As one example, over the last few months, they have gradually lowered the temperatures of some components slightly in order to reduce heater power. When Dawn stretched out its solar array wings shortly after separating from the Delta rocket on September 27, 2007, its nearly 65-foot wingspan was the longest of any NASA interplanetary probe. The large area of solar cells is needed to collect enough light from the distant sun to power the ion propulsion system and all other spacecraft systems. Devoting a little less power to heaters allows more power to be applied to ionizing and accelerating xenon, yielding greater thrust. With two and a half years of powered flight required to travel from Vesta to Ceres, even a little extra power can make a worthwhile difference to a mission that craves power.

Most temperature adjustments are only two degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) at a time, but even that requires careful analysis and investigation, because lowering the temperature of one component may affect another. Xenon and hydrazine propellants need to be maintained in certain ranges, and the lines they flow through follow complicated paths around the spacecraft, so the temperatures all along the way matter. Most of the hardware onboard, from valves and switches to electronics to structural mounts for sensitively aligned units, needs to be thermally regulated to keep Dawn shipshape.

It can take hours for a component to cool down and stabilize at a new setting, and sometimes the change won’t even occur until the spacecraft has turned away to resume thrusting, when the faint warmth of the sun and the deep cold of black space affect different parts of the complex robot. Then it will be another four weeks until engineers will receive a comprehensive report on all the temperatures, so they need to be cautious with each change.

› Continue reading Marc Rayman’s Dawn Journal

By Chip Miller

In this new series on “Big Fat Planet,” we will answer selected questions about Earth’s climate submitted by readers. Recently, a reader asked: “Is there still time to reduce climate change, or is it too late?” The following answer is from Dr. Chip Miller, a researcher specializing in remote sensing of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) and was deputy principal investigator for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite mission, which was designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from space.

This is a question that has been asked many times and many studies have investigated similar questions: What level of climate change is “acceptable”? What constitutes “dangerous interference” in the climate system?

The short answer is that it’s not too late to act, but our past actions may have already locked in certain outcomes and action is needed to avoid more substantial impacts in the future.

In the 1990s and early 2000s it was generally felt that a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels - that is, CO2 concentrations increasing to about 500 parts per million (ppm) - was “acceptable.” However, the series of studies from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that as climate models improve, average worldwide surface temperature is projected to increase well beyond the “acceptable” level of 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. (See the IPCC website for the reports and most recent information.)

Jim Hansen (head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) has been one of the more outspoken advocates of curtailing CO2 emissions immediately to return atmospheric CO2 levels to about 350 ppm (the level of carbon dioxide that was in the air in the late 1980s). The challenge here is that even if human emissions of CO2 were cut to zero today, there is an inertia in the climate system that would continue for hundreds to thousands of years as the system attempts to re-equilibrate. (See Hansen’s Royal Society paper, “Climate change and trace gases,” for more details.)

Michael Oppenheimer [Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University] and colleagues have taken a different approach to assessing climate change risk - they define the likelihood of certain environmental outcomes for different levels of atmospheric CO2 accumulation. (See their 2002 Science paper, “Dangerous climate impacts and the Kyoto Protocol,” for a look at three potential outcomes at different CO2 levels.)

Further reading:

“Perception of climate change,” J. Hansen, M. Sato & R. Ruedy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (6 August 2012); doi: 10.1073/pnas.1205276109.

This post was written for “My Big Fat Planet,” a blog hosted by Amber Jenkins on NASA’s Global Climate Change site.

By Marc Rayman
As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft makes its journey to its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres, Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer, shares a monthly update on the mission’s progress.

Artist’s concept of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft departing the giant asteroid Vesta. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Dawn concluded 2012 almost 13,000 times farther from Vesta than it began the year. At that time, it was in its lowest orbit, circling the alien world at an average altitude of only 210 kilometers (130 miles), scrutinizing the mysterious protoplanet to tease out its secrets about the dawn of the solar system.

To conduct its richly detailed exploration, Dawn spent nearly 14 months in orbit around Vesta, bound by the behemoth’s gravitational grip. In September they bid farewell, as the adventurer gently escaped from the long embrace and slipped back into orbit around the sun. The spaceship is on its own again in the main asteroid belt, its sights set on a 2015 rendezvous with dwarf planet Ceres. Its extensive ion thrusting is gradually enlarging its orbit and taking it ever farther from its erstwhile companion as their solar system paths diverge.

Meanwhile, on faraway Earth (and all the other locations throughout the cosmos where Dawnophiles reside), the trove of pictures and other precious measurements continue to be examined, analyzed, and admired by scientists and everyone else who yearns to glimpse distant celestial sights. And Earth itself, just as Vesta, Ceres, Dawn, and so many other members of the solar system family, continues to follow its own orbit around the sun.

Thanks to a coincidence of their independent trajectories, Earth and Dawn recently reached their smallest separation in well over a year, just as the tips of the hour hand and minute hand on a clock are relatively near every 65 minutes, 27 seconds. On Dec. 9, they were only 236 million kilometers (147 million miles) apart. Only? In human terms, this is not particularly close. Take a moment to let the immensity of their separation register. The International Space Station, for example, firmly in orbit around Earth, was 411 kilometers (255 miles) high that day, so our remote robotic explorer was 575 thousand times farther. If Earth were a soccer ball, the occupants of the orbiting outpost would have been a mere seven millimeters (less than a third of an inch) away. Our deep-space traveler would have been more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the ball. So although the planet and its extraterrestrial emissary were closer than usual, they were not in close proximity. Dawn remains extraordinarily far from all of its human friends and colleagues and the world they inhabit.

As the craft reshapes its solar orbit to match Ceres’s, it will wind up farther from the sun than it was while at Vesta. (As a reminder, see the table here that illustrates Dawn’s progress to each destination on its long interplanetary voyage.) We saw recently, however, that the route is complex, and the spacecraft is temporarily approaching the sun. Before the ship has had time to swing back out to a greater heliocentric range, Earth will have looped around again, and the two will briefly be even a little bit closer early in 2014. After that, however, they will never be so near each other again, as Dawn will climb higher and higher up the solar system hill, its quest for new and exciting knowledge of distant worlds taking it farther from the sun and hence from Earth.

› Continue reading Marc Rayman’s Dawn Journal to learn how to approximate Dawn’s position in the sky on Jan. 21 and 22

By Amber Jenkins

An interesting recent paper from Dr. Son Nghiem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues finds that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean controls the pattern of sea ice thousands of feet above on the water’s surface. The seafloor topography exerts its control not only locally, in the Bering, Chukchi, Beaufort, Barents and Greenland Seas, but also spanning hundreds to thousands of miles across the Arctic Ocean.

How? The seafloor influences the distribution of cold and warm waters in the Arctic Ocean where sea ice can preferentially grow or melt. Geological features on the ocean bottom also guide how the sea ice moves, along with influence from surface winds.

Interestingly, the study also links the bottom of the Arctic Ocean with cloud patterns up in the sky. The ocean bottom affects sea ice cover, which affects the amount of vapor coming from the surface of the ocean out into the air, which in turn influences cloud cover.

The researchers, who also come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Applied Physics Laboratory and the National/Naval Ice Center in the U.S., use sea ice maps taken from space with NASA’s QuickSCAT satellite, as well as measurements from drifting buoys in the Arctic Ocean. They compare the sea ice and seafloor topography patterns to identify the connection between the two.

Bottom line:

Since the seafloor does not change significantly over many years, sea ice patterns can form repeatedly and persist around certain underwater geological features. So computer models need to incorporate these features in order to improve their forecasts of how ice cover will change over the short- and long-term. This ‘memory’ of the underwater topography could help refine our predictions of what will happen to ice in the Arctic as the climate changes.

Source:

“Seafloor Control on Sea Ice,” S. V. Nghiem, P. Clemente-Colon, I.G. Rigor, D.K. Hall & G. Neumann, Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, Volumes 77-80, pp 52-61 (2012).

This post was written for “My Big Fat Planet,” a blog hosted by Amber Jenkins on NASA’s Global Climate Change site.

By Amber Jenkins

    Earth at night, as seen by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, a joint effort by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory and NOAA National Geophysical Data Center.

This is a new image of our planet at night, as taken by a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite orbiting above us. Scientists recently unveiled this global composite image (and the one below), constructed using cloud-free nighttime images. They show the glow of natural and man-made phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever seen before. City lights can tell us about how humans have spread across the globe.

Many satellites are equipped to look at Earth during the day, when they can observe our planet fully illuminated by the sun. But with a new sensor onboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite launched last year, scientists now can observe Earth’s atmosphere and surface during nighttime hours.

For more Earth at night images, see this article.

This post was written for “My Big Fat Planet,” a blog hosted by Amber Jenkins on NASA’s Global Climate Change site.

By Marc Rayman
As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft makes its journey to its second target, the dwarf planet Ceres, Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer, shares a monthly update on the mission’s progress.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft departed the giant asteroid Vesta on Sept. 04, 2012 PDT to begin its journey to a second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres, which is seen in this image from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech, Keck Observatory, C. Dumas

Dear Marvestalous Readers,

An interplanetary spaceship left Earth in 2007. Propelling itself gently and patiently through the solar system with a blue-green beam of xenon ions, it gradually spiraled away from the sun. It sailed past Mars in 2009, its sights set on more distant and exotic destinations. In July 2011, it gracefully and elegantly entered orbit around the second most massive resident of the main asteroid belt, Vesta. It spent more than 13 months there scrutinizing the gigantic protoplanet with all of its sensors and maneuvering to different orbits to optimize its investigations, making myriad marvelous discoveries. After they traveled together around the sun for 685 million kilometers (426 million miles), the ship left orbit in September 2012 and is now headed for dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body between the sun and Neptune not yet visited by a spacecraft. No other probe has ever been capable of the amazing feats Dawn is performing, exploring two of the largest uncharted worlds in the inner solar system.

The population of the main asteroid belt numbers in the millions. Vesta is such a behemoth that Dawn has now single-handedly examined about eight percent of the mass of the entire belt. And by the time it finishes at the colossus Ceres, it will have investigated around 40 percent.

The expedition to Vesta has produced riches beyond everyone’s hopes. With 31,000 photos, 20 million visible and infrared spectra, and thousands of hours of neutron spectra, gamma ray spectra, and gravity measurements, Dawn has revealed to humankind a unique and fascinating member of the solar system family. More akin to Earth and the other terrestrial planets than to typical asteroids, Vesta is not just another chunk of rock. It displays complex geology and even has a dense iron-nickel core, a mantle, and a crust. Its heavily cratered northern hemisphere tells the story of more than 4.5 billion years of battering in the rough and tumble asteroid belt. Its southern hemisphere was wiped clean, resurfaced by an enormous impact at least two billion years ago and an even greater collision one billion years ago. These events excavated the 400-kilometer (250-mile) Veneneia and 500-kilometer (310-mile) Rheasilvia basins. The larger basin has a mountain at the center that towers more than twice the height of Mt. Everest; indeed, it soars higher than all but one of the mountains known in the solar system. The impacts were so forceful, they nearly destroyed Vesta. The fierce shock reverberated through the entire body and left as scars an extraordinary network of vast troughs near the equator, some hundreds of kilometers (miles) long and 15 kilometers (10 miles) wide.

The powerful impacts liberated tremendous amounts of material, flinging rocks far out into space, some of which eventually made it all the way to Earth. It is astonishing that more than one thousand meteorites found here came from Vesta. We have some meteorites from Mars, and we have some meteorites from the moon, but we have far, far more that originated in those impacts at Vesta, so distant in time and space. Vesta, Mars, and the moon are the only celestial bodies identified as the source of specific meteorites.

Scientists will spend years productively poring through Dawn’s fabulous findings and learning what secrets they hold about the dawn of the solar system, and many more people will continue to marvel at the spectacular sights of this alien world. But the emissary from Earth has completed its assignment there and moved on. It has spent most of its time since the previous log using its ion propulsion system to climb higher and higher above Vesta. This departure spiral is the mirror image of the approach spiral the robotic adventurer followed last year. The unique method of entering and leaving orbit is one of the many intriguing characteristics of a mission that uses ion propulsion. Without that advanced technology, this ambitious deep space adventure would be impossible.

As Dawn ascended, Vesta’s gravitational grip grew weaker and weaker. At some point along its spiral, the explorer was far enough and moving fast enough that Vesta could no longer hold it in orbit. As smoothly and tenderly as Vesta had taken Dawn in its embrace last year, it released its erstwhile companion, each to go its own way around the sun. The bond was severed at about 11:26 p.m. PDT yesterday, when they were 17,200 kilometers (10,700 miles) apart, separating at the remarkably leisurely speed of less than 33 meters per second (73 miles per hour). Many of our readers drove their cars that fast today (although we hope it was not in school zones).

Unlike missions that use conventional chemical propulsion, there was no sudden change on the spacecraft and no nail-biting on Earth. If you had been in space watching the action, you probably would have been hungry, cold, and hypoxic, but you would not have noticed anything unusual about the scene. Apart from a possible hint of self-satisfaction, Dawn would have looked just as it had for most of its interplanetary flight, a monument to humankind’s ingenuity and passionate drive to know the cosmos perched atop a blue-green pillar of xenon ions. If, instead, you had been in Dawn mission control watching the action, you would have been in the dark and all alone (until JPL Security arrived). There was no need to have radio contact with the reliable spaceship. It had already thrust for almost 2.9 years, or 58 percent of its time in space. Thrusting during escape was no different. No one was tense or anxious; rather, all the drama is in the spectacular results of the bold mission at Vesta and the promise of what is to come at Ceres. When Dawn entered orbit, your correspondent was dancing. When Dawn left orbit, he was sleeping serenely.

A month earlier, on August 8, with the craft more than 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) above the surface, patiently powering its way up through Vesta’s gravity field, one of the reaction wheels experienced an increase in internal friction. Reaction wheels are used to control a spacecraft’s orientation in the frictionless, zero-gravity conditions of spaceflight. By electrically changing a wheel’s spin rate, Dawn can rotate or stabilize itself. Protective software quickly detected the event and correctly responded by deactivating that wheel and the other two that were operating, switching to the small jets that are available for the same function, and reconfiguring other systems, including powering off the ion thrust and turning to point the main antenna to Earth.

A routine communications session the next day revealed to mission controllers what had occurred. They had planned long ago to turn the wheels off for the flight from Vesta to Ceres, so having them off a few weeks early was not a significant change. The team soon restored the spacecraft to normal operations and reformulated the departure plan, and on August 17 Dawn resumed its ascent. Because of the hiatus in thrusting, escape shifted from August 26 to September 4. The flexibility in the mission timeline provided by ion propulsion made this delay easy to accommodate.

In order to conserve the hydrazine propellant that the jets use, the bonus departure observations described before were curtailed, as they were not a high priority for the mission. Nevertheless, on August 25 and 26, at an altitude of around 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), the explorer did peer at Vesta once more with its camera and visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. The last time it had been this far away was July 21, 2011, during its descent to an unfamiliar destination. This time, 13 months later, the spacecraft turned back for a final gaze at the magnificent world it had unveiled during its remarkable time there, a world that prior to last year had appeared as little more than a tiny smudge among the stars for the two centuries it had been observed.

The delay in the departure schedule provided a convenient benefit. Vesta has seasons, just as Earth does, although they progress more slowly on that distant orb. August 20 was the equinox, when northern hemisphere spring began. Until then, the sun had been in Vesta’s southern hemisphere throughout Dawn’s residence there. While most of the northern hemisphere was revealed during the second high-altitude mapping orbit, the illumination of the landscape immediately around the north pole was even better for this last look. After radioing its parting shots to wistful mission controllers, the ship commenced its climb again.

And then, with an stunningly successful mission behind it, a newly explored world below it, and a mysterious dwarf planet ahead of it, the indomitable and indefatigable adventurer left Vesta forever.

Dawn is 18,500 kilometers (11,500 miles) from Vesta and 64 million kilometers (40 million miles) from Ceres. It is also 2.45 AU (367 million kilometers or 228 million miles) from Earth, or 910 times as far as the moon and 2.43 times as far as the sun today. Radio signals, traveling at the universal limit of the speed of light, take 41 minutes to make the round trip.

Dr. Marc D. Rayman
10:00 a.m. PDT September 5, 2012

› Read previous Dawn Journals by Marc Rayman