Spacecraft Orbiting Massive Asteroid

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is orbiting around a massive asteroid named Vesta and is preparing to begin a study that may pre-date to the earliest era of the solar system. NASA officials say Dawn will get as close as 110 miles from Vesta. The spacecraft was launched in 2007 specifically for the purpose of reaching the asteroid. 

The entry into orbit occurred while the spacecraft's antenna was pointed away from Earth, so mission controllers had to wait for Dawn to re-establish contact to confirm its success.The capture was estimated to have occurred at 10 p.m. PDT Friday, when Dawn was 9,900 miles from Vesta and 117 million miles from Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," the mission's principal investigator, Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles, said in the statement.

NASA said that after the orbital capture, Dawn sent an initial close-up image taken for navigation purposes. Before the Dawn mission, images of Vesta were obtained by ground- and space-based telescopes but did not show much surface detail....Read more at the Sacramento Bee