By Xinhua
Washington : The US Dawn probe was launched into space by a Delta2 rocket Thursday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, according to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
From launch pad 17B, Dawn soared into the cloudy sky after being launched at 7.34 a.m. (1134 GMT), a little after dawn, beginning its long-waited asteroid belt trip.
Several minutes after the lift-off, NASA mission control centre reported that six of the solid-fuelled boosters have burned out and fallen away from the Delta2 rocket.
The three remaining boosters ignited to help speed the spacecraft on its way.
“Everything is reported in good shape during Dawn’s first climb into space,” said mission control centre.
Dawn will venture into the heart of that distant belt between Mars and Jupiter, where it will explore Ceres and Vesta, the two largest objects in the belt.
NASA’s Dawn asteroid mission was plagued with delays. It was originally set to launch in July, but was postponed several times due to unfavourable weather conditions or technical faults. And then the mission was rescheduled into September because of the limited launch opportunities in July.
The Dawn spacecraft finally began its eight-year, more than 5-billion-km odyssey mission. Seeking clues about the formation of our solar system, Dawn will first visit Vesta in 2011. And then in 2015, it will meet up with Ceres as scheduled.
Dawn’s goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system’s earliest epoch 4.5 billion years ago by investigating in exceptional detail the massive rocky asteroid Vesta, and then, the even bigger icy dwarf planet Ceres.
“Visiting both Vesta and Ceres enables a study in extraterrestrial contrasts,” said Dawn Principal Investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles.
“One is rocky and is representative of the building blocks that constructed the planets of the inner solar system. The other may very well be icy and represents the outer planets. Yet, these two very diverse bodies reside in essentially the same neighbourhood. It is one of the mysteries Dawn hopes to solve.”
Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit an object in the asteroid belt and the first to orbit two bodies after leaving Earth.
Using the same spacecraft to re-connoiter two different celestial targets makes more than fiscal sense, said Dawn Mission managers. “It makes scientific sense”.
By utilizing the same set of instruments at two separate destinations, scientists can more accurately formulate comparisons and contrasts. Dawn’s science instrument suite will measure mass, shape, surface topography and tectonic history, elemental and mineral composition, as well as seek out water-bearing minerals.
In addition, the Dawn spacecraft itself and the way it orbits both Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the celestial bodies’ gravity fields.
“Understanding conditions that lead to the formation of planets is a goal of NASA’s mission of exploration,” said David Lindstrom, Dawn program scientist. “The science returned from Vesta and Ceres could unlock many of the mysteries of the formation of the rocky planets including Earth.”