The DAWN Mission

The DAWN mission is on its way to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres to study each in depth. This is the first time that we have had a dedicated asteroid mission to the two largest asteroids (Ceres is a Dwarf Planet!) It is a US led international mission in which the main cameras (called DAWN Framing Camera or FC) are build in Germany. FC has 7 color filters + 1 clear filter to image the asteroids. Using these filter images we can study the composition of surface units on Vesta to know more about its formation history etc.

However, observational effects like phase angle (in this case Sun-Vesta-Spacecraft) would affect the way we interpret the color data. To minimize these phase angle effects we came up with this crazy idea to observe Vesta from the Earth using DAWN Filters (flight spare) on a small telescope! No one has attempted direct use of the spacecraft hardware to observe the target object before simply because it is logistically very challenging. With great difficulty we managed to find the filters. The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research has mounted these expensive filters on filter holders which can go on a regular CCD filter wheel. After 4 months of hard work by a lot of people at MPS, the filters have arrived in Hawaii. The next 10 days are going to be spent getting this project off the ground so I will be posting regular updates here.

This a collaborative project between The Max Planck Institute (Dr Andreas Nathues), Ironwood Observatory (Ken and Reid Archer) and University of North Dakota (Drs Vishnu Reddy, Mike Gaffey).

Dr.Vishnu Reddy