Tim Folger Mission To The Lost Planet Analysis

In the article Mission to the Lost Planet by Tim Folger, Folger tells us about how the belt between mars and Neptune has two gigantic asteroids named Ceres and Vesta, two asteroids that almost were formed into planets. Ceres is now considered a dwarf planet and Vesta has similar geological features that resemble Earth’s surface. Folger Begins to tell us about Marc Rayman who is a chief engineer for a NASA mission that launched a spacecraft known as Dawn into space to head towards both Ceres and Vesta in 2007. Folger then tells us about the history of Ceres and Vesta. He informs us that Ceres was discovered in 1801 and Vesta was discovered in 1807. At first they considered Ceres and Vesta part of the planets we have today but then astronomers decided to just call them …show more content…
Folger also tell us that Vesta and Ceres are among the only remaining relics from the Turbulent Era. Rayman additionally says that the Dawn mission is said to establish the way planets are formed. Folger commences to clarify how the Dawn spacecraft has an ion engine that allowed engineers to program a trajectory for the probe to gradually match Vistas’ path around the sun. Because of this dawn was able to catch up to Vesta and very slowly get pulled into Vestas’ gravitational pull. This was the first-time ion engines were used to send a spacecraft to orbit around a distant object in our solar system. Folger lets us know that in the beginning NASA canceled the Dawn mission because of how expensive it would be to support the mission and additionally they were concerned with the technical problems that could occur to the novel propulsion system. Charles Elachi was determined to Save the Dawn mission and was able to have NASA review the Dawn mission one more time. Three weeks after the cancelation the Dawn mission was back