The NASA Dawn Probe's stunning findings around the dwarf planet Ceres and the protoplanet 4 Vesta. A complete recap of the Dawn mission.Discover our full back catalogue of hundreds of videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@astrumspaceFor early access videos, bonus content, and to support the channel, join us on Patreon: https://astrumspace.info/4ayJJuZ
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2011 was an exciting year for astronomers. For over 200 years, mankind has known about the existence of gigantic asteroids found in the asteroid belt, but for most of that, they've only been specks in the night sky. The first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was found in 1801 and was added to the list of planets.
A year later, Pallas was discovered, and in the following years Juno and then Vesta. Because of this, in 1845, our solar system had 11 planets, the original 7 from Mercury to Uranus, as Neptune hadn't been discovered yet, plus the 4 asteroids. As more and more asteroids were discovered, it became clear that they couldn't all be listed as planets.
A good thing too, as today there are millions of known asteroids of various shapes and sizes. However, before 2011, we had never seen any of the original four asteroids up close. Enter the Dawn spacecraft. Launched in 2007, it had a very special mission, to explore and investigate not just one, but two of these large asteroids, first Vesta and then Ceres.
But what did it find and discover while it was there? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum, and in this video we will find out everything Dawn saw and discovered around the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and examine what made the Dawn spacecraft one of the most technically impressive probes ever produced, and how its success paved the way for NASA missions in production right now.
Let's start with Dawn itself. Its trip to Vesta took four years, utilising a slingshot from Mars' gravity along the way. And you'll be forgiven for not seeing anything special about this trip from this perspective. However, zooming in on the Dawn spacecraft itself reveals its very special feature, an ion engine.
Ion engines had been tested already on NASA's Deep Space One, however the way Dawn utilised it pushed this technology to a whole new level. Thanks to its ion engine, it was the first ever spacecraft to go into orbit around two separate extraterrestrial bodies. You see, while ion thrusters aren't very powerful, they are extremely efficient, and so can remain on for extended periods of time.
Unlike chemical thrusters, which rely on reactions causing heat and pressure to push gas away from the rocket, ion thrusters simply ionize neutral xenon gas with electricity to create acceleration. These ionized gas particles rush out of the engine at 150,000 km per hour, which pushes the spacecraft in the opposite direction. As the ionized gas is expended slowly,
Dawn can only create so much electric charge after all, the acceleration is really slow. It would take Dawn four days to accelerate from 0 to 100 km per hour. But over extended periods, it really adds up. Dawn was firing its thrusters for 85% of the time during the transit to Mars, expending only 72 kg of xenon propellant and gaining over 1.8 km per second velocity.
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