RocketSTEM Issue #14 - March 2017 | Page 67

Dawn’s rich harvest Ceres gives up secrets By Chris Starr FRAS FBIS Last June, the NASA-JPL Dawn mission team received the Robert J. Collier Trophy from the U.S. National Aeronautic Association (NAA), at a presentation in Arlington, Virginia. It was presented to them ‘In rec- ognition of the extraordinary achievements of orbiting and exploring proto-planet Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, and advancing the na- tion’s technological capabilities in pioneering new frontiers in space travel.” Previous recipients of this prestigious annual award, given for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in the USA, include Orville Wright, Chuck Yeager, the crew of Apollo 11, and NASA/ JPL’s Voyager (1980) and Mars Science Laboratory/ Curiosity (2012) mis- sion teams. L-R: NASA Deputy Administrator Dr. Dava Newman, Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr. Marc Rayman, Dawn Mission Director and Chief Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, accepting the 2015 Robert J. Collier Trophy on behalf of the NASA/JPL Dawn Mission Team at the Annual Robert J. Collier Trophy Dinner on Thursday, June 9, 2016 in Arlington, Virginia. Credit: NASA/ Joel Kowsky Dawn is certainly one of the most remarkable accomplishments yet in space exploration, being the only spacecraft to have visited and entered into orbit around two different bodies, thanks to its revolution- ary ion-propulsion system. As Dr. Marc Rayman, Dawn Chief Engineer and Mission Director at JPL, explains in his entertaining and informative ‘Dawn Journal’, ‘Providing the merest whisper of thrust, the ion engine allows Dawn to manoeuvre in ways entirely different from conventional spacecraft.’ The technical background to the Dawn mission, its science payload 65 www. RocketSTEM .org 65