NASA’s Dawn spacecraft was launched in 2007 with a mission that didn’t garner a great deal of attention in the press.  The small craft was headed for the asteroid belt, where it would be tasked with studying the development of protoplanets, or celestial bodies in orbit around our sun that could have developed into planets.  By learning more about these protoplanets, we can gain a better understanding of how our own planet formed – offering a bounty of sought-after knowledge to those interested in planetary science, but not much in the way of attention grabbing headlines.

Throughout 2011 and 2012, the Dawn spacecraft maintained an orbit around the protoplanet Vesta, returning data and images to NASA for further analysis, before setting off for its next target: Ceres, a large protoplanet located somewhere in the asteroid ridden gap between Mars and Jupiter.

Ceres is the largest body in our solar system’s asteroid belt, with a diameter of approximately 587 miles.  Over the past two years, the Dawn Spacecraft has been in orbit around the massive protoplanet, using its on board suite of analysis equipment to study the composition of the space rock and transmit its findings back to scientists on Earth – all of its work could be considered interesting in a certain regard, but wasn’t quite worthy of a press release.

That is, until last week.