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This animation shows NASA's Dawn spacecraft leaving the giant asteroid Vesta and arriving at the dwarf planet Ceres. The spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 15, 2011. After a year at Vesta, Dawn will depart in July 2012 and head toward its second destination, the dwarf planet Ceres, whee it will arrive in 2015.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are part of the mission team. More information about Dawn is online at http://www.nasa.gov/dawn.