Will NASA's Dawn spot ALIEN LIFE on asteroid belt dwarf world Ceres?

After seven years, and more than three billion miles of travel, the Dawn spacecraft has been captured by the gravity of the Solar System's dwarf planet Ceres. The NASA probe entered a stable orbit at 0439 PST (1239 UTC) on Friday. "We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the …

[Raifon]

Is There Life Elsewhere ?

NO, NO, NO, a million times, NO ! Only God, Angels and Saints !

[Toltec]

Re: Is There Life Elsewhere ?

Don't forget the teapots.

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I've never understood

How did they get down here when they abandoned the dwarf planet?

[Martin Budden]

Re: One thing I've never understood

With an ion drive?

[dan1980]

Will . . . ?

No.

[Christoph]

dwarf world Ceres

Is that a smaller version of the baseball championships?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: dwarf world Ceres

You have my bat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: dwarf world Ceres

Indeed, where knocking it out of the park achieves orbit.

[frank ly]

Power

"The Dawn spacecraft has used its three xenon-powered thrusters, ..."

The 'power' actually comes from a solar cell array that produces 1.3KW. (I'm just being picky here).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29

[Robert Helpmann??]

Re: Power

Dawn carries less than a tonne of liquid xenon, and wouldn’t have been able to reach Ceres using rocket fuel: launching all that material in space would be too expensive.

I would think that using traditional fuel thrusters would have gotten it there, just nowhere near as quickly. The increase in efficiency is wonderful, though. If engineers can continue to improve upon it, we may end up with an engine that can get us across the universe using no fuel whatsoever. To preempt the naming war that will inevitably spring up around such an invention, I dub it the Jireček drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go Dawn, go!!

A valuable mission, exploring the major bodies in the asteroid belt, the development of which I think would probably be a more practical and economically lucrative effort than trying to colonize Mars.

[Zog_but_not_the_first]

Xenon-powered thrusters...

A phrase from my sci-fi childhood become real.

Tingles up the back of the neck.

[Mikel]

Ceres is a jewel of the sky

Planetary Resources talks about mining asteroids. This one is the mother lode. 2.8 million square kilometers of surface area covered in high grade platinum group metals ore, endless water, 0.03 G surface gravity, immense caves for habitation, premade steam volcano to drive a turbine. As Dawn gets closer we will see much more.

It is a far better habitat for a colony than Mars. A bit far - twice as far as Mars - but Musk is sorting out the quick and inexpensive trip.

Whoever winds up owning this thing will have more wealth than anybody ever before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ceres is a jewel of the sky

I was reading yesterday that because of its location and its minimal gravity it's just as easy to go to Ceres and land there as it is to Mars. Plenty of water, as you say, and a good jumping off spot for the rest of the solar system.

[John Smith 19]

And a 66 megapixel camera

Quite a bit more than the average camera phone.

Seriously this is a terrific achievement

[Mikel]

Re: And a 66 megapixel camera

I didn't know this.

The final survey images should be wonderful then. I liked the pics from 40,000 km above. 400 km should be amazing.