LIKE a Greek siren, the asteroid Vesta has lured the NASA probe Dawn into orbit around it. Yet despite the data the probe will collect, the asteroid will stymie attempts to understand the long-term fate of the solar system.
Dawn slipped into Vesta's orbit on Saturday. For the next year it will study Vesta's topography and composition before heading to a bigger asteroid called Ceres. Vesta has a core, mantle and crust, while Ceres seems to contain a lot of ice. Dawn could help astronomers learn why they are so different.
Meanwhile, Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory in France and colleagues have determined that chaotic interactions between Vesta and Ceres affect the orbits of the planets in our solar system. These tugs will prevent us from calculating the planets' paths more than 60 million ...
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