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In this issue:
Dawn Mission Status
Dawn Instruments are Delivered to Orbital
Ceres Results Published in Nature
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Dawn Instruments are Delivered to Orbital
Edward A. Miller
Dawn Payload Manager, JPL
The Dawn spacecraft will carry three
instruments to study the protoplanets Vesta and Ceres. The redundant framing cameras,
provided by the Max Planck Institute, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany (H-U.
Keller, PI), and DLR in Berlin, arrived separately in August and
September. A sketch of
one of the cameras before blanketing is shown in Figure 1. Figure 2 shows
the assembled Visible and InfraRed (VIR) mapping spectrometer. The VIR Main electronics, housed
inside the spacecraft, has been delivered to Orbital. The Optics Module
will be delivered in mid-November. The Gamma Ray and Neutron Detection
(GRaND) instrument, pictured in Figure 3, has completed environmental
testing at Los Alamos National Lab, and arrives at Orbital on November 14. The framing cameras have been bench-tested
and await integration.
Instrument integration is expected to occur during the stand down
period.
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Figure 1.
A single framing camera. The camera has a 1024x1024 CCD and 5.5ox5.5o
field-of-view.
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Figure 2.
VIR Optics Module shown during the vibration testing.
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Figure 3. Los Alamos gamma-ray and neutron
spectrometer (GRaND)
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