Dawn bids farewell to Vesta, heads for dwarf planet Ceres

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Dawn bids farewell to Vesta, heads for dwarf planet Ceres

After spending a year circling and studying the asteroid Vesta, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is now on its way to Ceres. Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt and the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system.

Astronomers think that Ceres probably has a rocky core with an icy surface, and there’s a chance for a liquid water ocean somewhere underneath. Hubble has seen a mysterious bright spot on the surface of Ceres that nobody has been able to identify as of yet, and there’s even a slim chance that there may be life out there, although if there is, Dawn isn’t necessarily equipped to detect it. By 2015, the spacecraft will be sending back better pictures of Ceres than we’ve ever seen before, and the plan is for Dawn to spend nearly a year in orbit.

This is a video of Dawn’s year in orbit around Vesta, made up of images beamed back to Earth: