Orbiting an asteroid, discovering new planets

NASA’s spacecraft Dawn has started its orbit around a large asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The asteroid, Vesta, captured Dawn in its orbit late last week and the spacecraft has been getting close enough to send back detailed images of the surface. “We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system,” wrote Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell in an article on NASA’s website. “So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta’s history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons.” Over the coming weeks, the team back on Earth will analyse the data and look for possible moons around Vesta, which, at over 500 kilometres in diameter, is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt. The plan is for Dawn to orbit Vesta for one year then move on to the dwarf planet Ceres, arriving in 2015.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists from France and the UK have clocked several new “exoplanets” outside our solar system. Using a space telescope, operated by the French Space Agency, they spotted one planet orbiting what’s thought to be a relatively young star – a mere few tens of millions of years old – as well as several Jupiter-like planets, two Neptune-sized planets orbiting the same star and one planet around the size of Saturn, according to the Cordis website.