It was great to hear that Dawn successfully arrived in orbit around Vesta, however there’s one thing missing… the photos!

So far, all we’ve had is a couple of blurry shots as Dawn approached Vesta, and a single shot now that it’s in orbit.

According to the NASA watch, even though Dawn’s been captured by Vesta, it’s not in it’s final orbit. To get there, it’s using it’s ion thrusters and since since the communications dish is fixed, if Dawn turns away from the Earth, we can’t receive any pictures.

Dawn won’t be in it’s final orbit till mid August, so I guess we’re just going to have to wait until Dawn is good and ready to start sending back postcards.

I’m probably a little more eager than most to get the photos as I’m keen to update the preliminary Vesta model I put into Solar Explorer last week.

We should hear a bit later today whether Dawn has successfully entered orbit around Vesta. The reason for the delay is that the ion engines have been in use for some time as Dawn made it’s approach to Vesta, which has resulted in the communications dish being pointed away from Earth.

Continuing my personal celebration of Dawn’s arrival at Vesta, I’ve now updated Solar Explorer to include a model of Dawn, to complement the model of Vesta I released a couple of days ago.

There’s certainly a lot happening in space lately. The shuttle reitring, the Chinese talking about putting up a space station soon and Virgin Galactic’s first commercial flight getting closer.

One which interests me in particular is the arrival of NASA’s Dawn probe at Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the belt.

As it stands we have very little information about the Asteroids, just blurry telescope shots. Dawn will rectify that when it spends one year at Vesta before moving off to orbit Ceres, the largest Asteroid.

To celebrate Dawn’s arrival at Vesta, I have added a preliminary model of Vesta to Solar Explorer. It’s preliminary because it’s based on what data we have available, which is a rough shape estimate, which I’ve textured to look a bit like Deimos until we get better photos of Vesta from all sides.