Scientist thrilled by launch

McFadden watched the launch from KARS Park.

The successful launch of the Dawn mission will bring a wealth of scientific knowledge, explained scientist Lucy McFadden, Dawn mission co-investigator from the University of Maryland.

"We're venturing out to unknown worlds. I can make a guess about what we're going to see, but we're going to be surprised. We're venturing out into the frontier of the asteroid belt beyond Mars, where we're going to see bodies that have experienced the processes of the early solar system that we don't currently understand."

Dawn will visit two unevolved asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, on an eight-year mission.

"We're looking toward essentially looking back in time to see how the planets formed in the early solar system. We're trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle of how the whole solar system formed. Ceres and Vesta were growing into planets, but their growth and development was interrupted by the formation of Jupiter," she said.

The asteriod belt is between Mars and Jupiter.

"The other planets continued to form, but the history of the early planets has been erased in the Earth, so we have to go look at these other planets to see what was happening there. This gives us a chance to look back in time."















Leaving the clouds behind, the Delta II rocket carrying the Dawn spacecraft arcs through the blue sky over the Atlantic Ocean. Liftoff was at 7:34 a.m. EDT from Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Dawn is the ninth mission in NASA's Discovery Program. The spacecraft will be the first to orbit two planetary bodies, asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, during a single mission. Vesta and Ceres lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is also NASA's first purely scientific mission powered by three solar electric ion propulsion engines. Photo by George Shelton/NASA.