Now That Dawn Is History, Should NASA Send Another Mission to Ceres?

[Judi Lynn]

By Hanneke Weitering, Space.com Staff Writer | November 5, 2018 07:25am

Nearly three years since NASA's Dawn mission arrived at Ceres, the spacecraft has run out of fuel. Is it time to start thinking about sending another mission to the dwarf planet?

The $467 million Dawn spacecraft launched in 2007 on a mission to study the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. After studying the asteroid Vesta from orbit for about a year, it moved on to Ceres, the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system and the largest space rock orbiting in the asteroid belt.

While in orbit at Ceres, Dawn discovered that the dwarf planet sports hundreds of weird bright spots, contains plenty of water ice and has organic molecules (the basic building blocks for life) on its surface. By the mission's end, however, scientists were still left with some big questions about Ceres and what it can teach us about the possibilities of life beyond Earth — questions that could be answered with a follow-up trip to the surface. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA's Dawn Spacecraft]

- link for image -

https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA4MC81MTAvb3JpZ2luYWwvZGF3bi1jZXJlcy1vY2NhdG9yLmpwZz8xNTQxMTkwODQ4

One of the last images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows bright spots in Occator Crater. Dawn captured this view on Sept. 1, 2018, from an altitude of 2,340 miles (3,370 kilometers) above the dwarf planet's surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

"I think the kinds of questions that we are going to be left with will probably require going down to the surface, because there's only so much you can tell from orbit," Paul Schenk, a participating scientist for the Dawn mission with the Universities Space Research Association at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told Space.com.

More:
https://www.space.com/42335-should-nasa-send-another-mission-to-ceres.html?utm_source=notification

[exboyfil]

1. Mission I would like to see

would be a scoop mission to the geysers from Europa or other gas giant moons. A penetrator with sensors into the water ocean under the ice would also be a possibility (or combined mission). I wonder if a scoop mission could even include a return to earth with samples.