Houston, TX

If you are my age (give or take) you might remember an old song called Delta Dawn. That song gets stuck in my head when I see news about the Delta II rocket taking the Dawn Spacecraft on a mission.

This $449 million eight-year mission will take the Dawn Spacecraft to the asteroid belt to study Vesta, the largest object in the asteroid belt, and Ceres, a dwarf planet.

According to the Houston Chronicle

The probe’s first destination is Vesta, an asteroid about the size of Arizona, where observations with telescopes suggest it has qualities like the solar system’s rocky inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Dawn should reach Vesta in August 2011.

After circling Vesta for seven months, the spacecraft will aim for Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The Texas-sized object may have a weak atmosphere, a thick layer of water frozen below a dusty surface and polar caps. Those qualities resemble those of the moons of the solar system’s outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Moved along by ion propulsion, Dawn would reach Ceres in February 2015 for at least six months of observations.

The purpose of the mission is to, “provide scientists with new clues about the collection of rocky materials that were left over from the formation of the planets. Thousands of asteroids orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter.”

Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt.

dwarf planet, Vesta, Ceres, asteroid belt, Delta II, Delta rocket, Dawn spacecraft