NASA Dawn Spacecraft Has "Glitch" While Moving Into New Orbit Around Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has had a long and tremendously successful trip past Vesta and now is circling the Dwarf Planet Ceres at its current mapping Altitude of 2700 feet.  During the long trip to Ceres the spacecrafts imaging instruments have captured very strange lights that seem to be emitting from the Dwarf Planet.  Expecting to see new images today which would hopefully give me a better resolution of this anomaly I found a press release dated from July 6th, 2015 stating that “Dawn Holding in Second Mapping Orbit”.  This immediately was odd to me and after reading the first paragraph I learned there was a major anomaly while starting the trip from the Second Mapping Orbit on down to the Third Mapping Orbit.  The anomaly was so severe that it stopped the thrusters and immediately put the spacecraft into “Safe Mode” and sent home a signal to Earth asking what it should do next.

NASA now states that the spacecraft has been returned to normal orbit and is using the correct antenna to communicate with Earth but engineers will now delay the next attempt to move to the next phase of the mission until they have figured out what just happened.   What do you think about the “glitch”?  Already people are buzzing that NASA wants even more time now to manipulate the images of the Dwarf Planet and turn the lights into whatever they want to explain them as.  I myself am hoping that the engineers do everything possible to avoid any problems with the Ion Propulsion System when they fire it back up to get our next set of “Strange Light” images from Ceres!  

YouTube User:  WhatsUpInTheSky37

I was eager today to see if any new images have returned to Earth from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and to my surprise I saw this press release entitled “Dawn Holding Second Mapping Orbit” (linked below) in which they totally buried the true headline.  Dawn suffered an Anomaly when it went to move from its current orbit around Ceres to its third mapping orbit.  This anomaly even shut down the thrusters according to the press release.  This came on the heals of the New Horizons glitch on July 4th which sent it into safe mode.  So many anomalies later I am surprised the headline did not point out the anomaly.  I really want to hear what you subscribers think about this one!   

NASA Link: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/dawn-holding-in-second-mapping-orbit

Image Of Lights On Ceres:

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Will Farrar – [email protected] –   http://www.youtube.com/whatsupinthesky37

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