[meteorite-list] NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told To 'Stand Down'

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Nov 7 13:38:29 2005
Message-ID: <200511071837.jA7Ib3Y04544_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/051107_dawn_qown.html

NASA Dawn Asteroid Mission Told To 'Stand Down'
By Leonard David
space.com
07 November 2005

A NASA mission to two of the largest asteroids in the solar system being
readied for liftoff next year has been placed in "stand down" mode.

The ion-engine propelled Dawn mission is dedicated to investigating the
two most massive asteroids known: Vesta and Ceres. These two "baby
planets" are very different from each other yet both offer tantalizing
clues about the formation of the solar system. Dawn is designed to
improve scientific understanding of how planets formed during the
earliest epoch of the solar system.

Dawn has been on NASA's books for liftoff in mid-June 2006.

The decision to stand down, according to SPACE.com sources, appears
related to budget-related measures and workforce cutbacks at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Extremely robust mission

"Yes...NASA has asked us to stand down," said Dawn's principal
investigator, Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA). "None of us take this as any indication that they [NASA
Headquarters] do not want to launch Dawn," he told SPACE.com, given
"strong words of support" from space agency personnel in Washington, D.C.

Russell said that Dawn is an extremely robust mission. The particular
launch opportunity that the spacecraft mission is heading for is
extremely long - over a year long, he noted.

"This is both a blessing and a curse," Russell said. "Typically a
planetary mission heading to a launch opportunity has a very limited
time for any delays. In this case, we can tolerate delay in launch
without science impact, and so when someone wishes to review an issue to
gain more confidence that it is completely resolved then it may result
in increased expenditures but not loss of the mission," he added.

Russell said that there are a number of technical issues that on a
chemical launch would be examined in parallel to development, "but in
this case we were asked to stand down while an independent assessment
team reports back to headquarters. This has interrupted the final
preparations for launch and we wish that they had not done this, but it
is something we can tolerate."

Econo-class mission

Dawn is a NASA Discovery-class mission, selected in December 2001. The
goal of the Discovery program is to launch many smaller missions with
fast development times, each for a fraction of the cost of NASA's larger
missions. Such spacecraft missions are designed to tackle important
questions in science yet do it for a very modest cost.

Dawn is managed by JPL with Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles,
Virginia developing the spacecraft.

Earlier this year, the Dawn spacecraft began Assembly, Test and Launch
Operations (ATLO). Spacecraft integration and testing of Dawn has been
progressing very well, according to Tom Fraschetti, JPL's Dawn Project
Manager in a status update last month that was posted on the Dawn
project website.

Ceres, the mini planet

The importance of spacecraft exploration of Ceres, for instance, was
recently underscored by astronomical study of the object.

In September it was announced that observations of Ceres made by NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the object may be a "mini
planet" - perhaps loaded with large amounts of pure water ice beneath its
surface.

"Ceres is an embryonic planet," noted Lucy McFadden of the Department of
Astronomy at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. She
is a member of the team that made the Hubble observations, and is also a
member of the science team on the Dawn mission.

"Gravitational perturbations from Jupiter billions of years ago
prevented Ceres from accreting more material to become a full-fledged
planet," McFadden explained in a press release announcing the
observations, issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, Maryland.
Received on Mon 07 Nov 2005 01:37:03 PM PST