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...infrared spectrum, rather than in the visible-light spectrum, where previous results had suggested but not proven the presence of water. "The signature in the infrared is much more distinctive," says lead researcher Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow now at University College London. Using measurements taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Tinetti and her team clearly found in the wavelength variation pattern the three bands that signify water...
...This article consists of a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] The designers at NASA are preparing to fly what may be the feeblest spacecraft they've ever built--and they couldn't be prouder of it. Never mind the decades of unmanned probes that have gone roaring into the void at tens of thousands of miles per hour, fire streaming from their tails. The new ship will putt-putt into interplanetary space under the power--if that's even the word--of an engine that accelerates by barely 15 m.p.h. (24 km/h) per day, or zero...
...duck of a spacecraft, scheduled to launch in September, is known simply as Dawn, and its destinations are the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, mysterious bodies orbiting in the belt of rubble that circles the sun between Mars and Venus. NASA vehicles have been this way before, but they've usually been just passing through on their way to the planets in the outer solar system. This time the asteroid belt itself will be the destination, and the ship will get there courtesy of the young technology of ion propulsion...
...going to two bodies," says systems engineer Marc Rayman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "If we wanted to go to even one of them, we'd normally have to carry several tons of propellant and would need one of the largest rockets in the U.S. inventory to get it off the ground...
...matter what the ship eventually reveals about Vesta and Ceres, NASA believes a successful mission could help establish ion technology as the propulsion system of choice for any mission in which the need for fuel is high and the need for speed is low. "Because of ion propulsion," says Rayman, "Dawn can explore the last unexplored worlds in the solar system." Not bad on a single small tank...