Phoenix and Dawn

[mmcirvin]

Successful launch for the Phoenix lander, due to touch down in May in the north polar region of Mars, where ice should be available for investigation just below the surface. The mission is called that because the spacecraft and its mission are assembled out of elements of the failed Mars Polar Lander, which crashed in 1999, and the mothballed Mars Surveyor 2001 lander, whose mission was canceled in the wake of the Polar Lander/Climate Orbiter failures (if I'm reading correctly, the body of Phoenix physically is the Mars Surveyor 2001 lander with some modifications).

The launch of Phoenix bumped the launch of the frequently-delayed-and-imperiled Dawn spacecraft to September. Dawn, which will go into orbit around the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta, is actually the one I'm more excited about. Various asteroids have been encountered by spacecraft and in one case orbited and landed on, but Ceres is really more like a small planet (complete with considerable amounts of ice on the surface--the IAU actually classifies it as a "dwarf planet" now, same status as Pluto), and Vesta should be a pretty spectacular object, a flattened ellipsoid with one whole hemisphere apparently dominated by an enormous crater with a tall central peak. The large asteroids are the last unexplored major worlds of the inner solar system, and it will be great to see two of them up close.

It'll be a few years before Dawn gets to either of them, though: after a Mars gravity assist in 2009, it gets to Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you'd make a space-tastic post, so I could get you this link I found about the current project to scan and release on the internet all photos and video from the Apollo program (http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/) starting now and completing the work around 3 years from now.

And then you did, so here's the link: http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/