18 February 2011: Dawn is now just 5 million km away from Vesta

Friday, February 18, 2011

This will probably be the last of my posts tracking the distance from the probe Dawn to its first destination Vesta, as now that it is within 5 million km it really isn't that hard to picture the distance. The distance from the Earth to the Moon for example is 384,000 km so that's only 13 times farther away. So instead of comparing the distance with the asteroid 21 Lutetia at 900,000 km as first photographed by the Rosetta probe, we'll just go with an image showing the distance compared to that between us and the Moon. The only thing that isn't to scale on this image is the size of Vesta, as it is quite tiny compared to the Earth and the Moon and trying to do that to scale as well wouldn't be that helpful.

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