Asteroid Belt Research Paper

This paper is an overview of dawn mission which was launched in September 2007 by NASA to study two of the large bodies in the asteroid belt and these protoplanets are Vesta and Ceres. The dawn mission was a mission that was designed to travel to the center of the main asteroid belt to orbit and study two of the largest belt asteroid and those belt asteroids are Vesta and Ceres. Dawn was not only sent to study and understand the present states of Vesta and Ceres, and it was also sent there to understand the condition during when these two bodies were developing. There are measurement objectives that are set to understand these bodies like how the asteroids properties such slopes, mass, density, and spin state are perfectly determined, and …show more content…
In the 16th century, Tycho Brahe started to begin understanding the accurate position of the planets in the sky. Then there was Baron Franz Zaver von Zach who was really the most interested in this search and he would stay up much of the time at night to scan the sky. On January 1, 1801, one of the other observers named Giuseppe Piazzi saw a Star that was dim and it was not on his charts, and that star had moved next night. Piazzi would continue to observe even through the bad weather and until illness brought him to a close of finding a planet. Piazzi soon realized that he had found a minor planet even though the appearance of the object was not comet-like. C.F. Gauss was the guy that came up with a mathematical way to break down how the orbit from the limited tracking available. Zach used Gauss’s orbital calculation to discover this new celestial body in the asteroid belt that was named Ceres later on. Shortly the study for the next discovery opportunity came in 2000 for MBAR mission, and after completing the investigation of Vesta then it was found that Vesta and Ceres had approached each other quite often that it might be possible to reach Ceres and orbit it. (Reference 5,