Dawn was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 26th 2007. Its goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the Solar System’s earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations: Ceres and Vesta, 2 asteroids of the asteroid belt.
Each of them has followed a very different evolutionary path constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution. One of the 3 experiments of Dawn is VIR, the imaging spectrometer provided by IAPS.
Persona di Riferimento: Maria Cristina De Sanctis