CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is on its way to study a pair of asteroids after lifting off Thursday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:34 a.m. EDT. Mission controllers at ...

As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft approaches the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the protoplanet Vesta is coming into view, 143 million miles away from Earth. As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft ...

On Saturday, July 16, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn will study asteroid Vesta for a year before ...

Vesta appears in a splendid rainbow-colored palette in new images obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. The colors, assigned by scientists to show different rock or mineral types, reveal Vesta to be a ...

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned the first close-up image after beginning its orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta. On Saturday, July 16, Dawn became the first probe to enter orbit around an ...

Known as flow formations, these channels could be etched on bodies that would seem inhospitable to liquid because they are exposed to the extreme vacuum conditions of space. Pocked with craters, the ...

This Dawn framing camera (FC) image of Vesta shows Canuleia crater, which is the large, irregularly shaped crater in the top left of the image. Canuleia’s average diameter is roughly 11 kilometers ...

NASA Dawn mission researchers undertaking the first global analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta have looked back at the history of our solar system and found evidence of surprisingly recent collisions ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. For decades, scientists thought that Vesta was a protoplanet rather than an asteroid. NASA's Dawn mission seemed to confirm that, ...

Pocked with craters, the surfaces of many celestial bodies in our solar system provide clear evidence of a 4.6-billion-year battering by meteoroids and other space debris. But on some worlds, ...