Hey fourth graders, plan a welcoming party for your eight grade year! The feisty Mars duo of robots of Opportunity and Spirit now enduring a major dust storm on Mars will have a fascinating new robotic companion pushing into the space beyond Mars, an asteroid hopper named Dawn. She is programmed to reach orbit around the chunk of ice known as Ceres in the year 2011.
Between Mars and Jupiter astronomers have mapped the asteroid belt that might be described as a floating rock garden of scrap left over from the formation of the solar system. This hardened soup of chemicals mixes asteroids as diverse as ice, basalt, and nickel. It raises the suspicion that much more diverse and interesting lumps are there. Is there a lump for every possible element on the Periodic Table of Elements? Is there a mile wide hunk of gold floating there? This extra chunky soup also provides a kind of measurement of what we as a solar system are made of by examining the ingredients. Further, if the robot called Dawn can rock-hop from one to the other to study them, at some point we can mine them.
In the mean time, watch Dawn's launch on NASA Web TV, a blast off which has recently been reset to some time after July 15, 2007.
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
Don't miss a great 13 minute animated movie by Leonard Nimoy of Dawn's mission.
Research to put into comments: What search terms will work best to follow the future news on Dawn? Are there automated agents, web robots, that will deliver that news to you automatically and if so, how do they work?
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