Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) received telemetry at 9:44 a.m. yesterday, indicating that the Dawn spacecraft had achieved proper orientation in space and its massive solar array was generating power from the sun. Dawn has begun it's 3-billion-mile odyssey that will include the exploration of asteroid Vesta in 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Dawn Principal Investigator Christopher Russell, University of California, Los Angeles said "This is a moment the space science community has been waiting for since interplanetary spaceflight became possible." NASA press release here.
