asteroidbelt
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NASA says goodbye to its Dawn spacecraft after 11 years of service
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has run out of fuel, and its mission has come to an end. Launched in 2007, Dawn orbited the two largest bodies in the main asteroid belt -- Vesta and Ceres -- collecting valuable data that have helped scientists understand how objects formed in the early solar system. "Today, we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission -- its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it gave us and the entire team who enabled the spacecraft to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. "The astounding images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are critical to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system."
The wreckage of a few ancient planets formed the asteroid belt
It's exciting to watch Japan's Hayabusa 2 craft close in on its chosen asteroid and start surveying it from up close, but we can still learn things about them from down here. A new study has determined that 85 percent of our solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is made up of the remnants of five or six ancient small planets.
