NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA On Friday, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will make history by becoming the first spacecraft to reach a dwarf planet, said Robert Mase, project manager for the Dawn mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, during a NASA press conference today.
While Pluto might be the most famous of the dwarf planets, Ceres is the closest at 257 million miles from Earth — just about 100 million miles farther than Mars.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt — a strip of rocky debris floating in space between Mars and Jupiter. The Dawn spacecraft has been jetting toward Ceres since it was launched in 2007, finally set to approach and orbit its destination around 7:20 am Friday, March 6, after 8 years of travel.
“At its closest approach [on Friday], Dawn is within 25,000 miles to Ceres,” Mase said during the press conference. That’s about 10 times closer than the Moon is to Earth.
Over the next year, Dawn will descend even closer to Ceres until it’s only 230 miles above the surface — lower than the height of International Space Station above Earth. During that time, the spacecraft will study the dwarf planet’s rocky surface and its many intriguing features including its mysterious bright spots, craters, and smooth features. The mission will last through June 2016.