NASA has confirmed its Dawn spacecraft has reached Ceres and is orbiting the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
According to BBC News, the 16-month mission is the first time a spacecraft will orbit a dwarf planet. Mission managers will be taking the next month to transition the satellite into the primary phase of its science mission.
"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. "Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home."
Dawn has been operating in space for more than seven years and most recently orbited Vesta, a massive asteroid in the belt from 2011 to 2012.
"Both Ceres and Vesta, we believe, are proto-planets. They were on their way to forming larger planetary embryos and they were the type of object that merged to form the terrestrial planets," Carol Raymond, the mission's deputy principal investigator at JPL, told BBC News. "But these two stopped before they reached that evolutionary stage, and so they are essentially these intact 'time capsules' from the very beginning of our Solar System; and that's really the motivation for why Dawn is going there to explore them in detail."
Dawn's mission has already generated intrigue before it officially started its mission, spotting two strange white spots on the dwarf planet's surface.
"We feel exhilarated," Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in the release. "We have much to do over the next year and a half, but we are now on station with ample reserves, and a robust plan to obtain our science objectives."
