NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology
Text Version

[Dramatic music plays in the background.]

Image description: The image zooms in on a spacecraft as the text Destination Ceres: Breakfast at Dawn appears on screen.

Narration: that there's a distant solar system world Ceres. It was discovered 200 years ago and it's had sort of an identity crisis. It used to be known as a planet and then an asteroid and now a dwarf planet.  Well, whatever you call it, Dawn, with its xenon ion propulsion system, is about to call it home.

Image description: A NASA scientist speaks as he is preparing to eat a breakfast cereal called Ceres-os.  He points to the Dawn spacecraft image on the cereal box and the screen transitions to an animation of the Dawn spacecraft moving in outer space towards a round planet.

Narration: Dawn is truly an historic mission. It's the first mission to orbit a main belt asteroid, and it's the first mission to orbit two interplanetary bodies, two fossils from the very beginning of our solar system and thus, it's telling us part of the story of our own beginnings.

Image description: Carol Raymond, Dawn Deputy Principal Investigator speaks. An animation appears showing the Dawn spacecraft floating swiftly towards a planet. The animation changes to show Dawn orbiting the sun along with the planets.

Narration: Dawn orbited Vesta and spent fourteen months exploring that alien world. We saw a crater there 300 miles in diameter and in the center of that crater there's a mountain that's two and a half times the height of Mount Everest.

Image description: The NASA scientist from the beginning of the video speaks. An animation from the point of view of the Dawn spacecraft travels alongside the surface of Vesta showing its large craters.

Narration: It's very young. It formed very hot. But we also found that there was water on Vesta and that water had to come from somewhere else.

Image description: Carol Raymond speaks as the animation continues showing the dark, crater filled surface of Vesta.

Narration: And now we're on the verge of exploring an even larger alien world, Ceres. Thanks to Dawn's unique ion propulsion system, it has a different way of going into orbit around Ceres from what we're used to. It will slowly creep up on Ceres and gently use its ion propulsion system to gracefully slip into orbit. Dawn is going to be revealing to us this mysterious world that for more than two centuries has been just a faint smudge of light amidst the stars. We're now getting pictures that are better than the best we'd ever had before.

Image description: The NASA scientist continues to speak as an animation of Dawn is shown circling the Ceres planet from a distance. The orbit first begins in a circular motion and then takes a sharper curve and circles back around the planet in a vertical loop. A video appears showing actual footage of the Ceres planet taken by the Dawn spacecraft. The image begins far away and then slowly zooms in as Dawn gets closer to the planet.

Narration: The bright spot that's been seen in the approach images is very interesting because it's in the same region, where the Hershel Space Observatory detected water vapor emission from Ceres' surface. It's possible that objects like Ceres brought water to the Earth. It has a rocky core and an ice mantle and in the past had an ocean like Europa and Enceladus.

Image description: Carol Rayomnd speaks. An animation appears showing a close up of an object like Ceres traveling swiftly towards the Earth. An illustration appears showing the rocky core of the Ceres planet. The rocky core is labeled in the center opening, water ice is labeled as the next layer outside of the core, and thin, dusty crust is labeled on the surface, the outermost layer.

Narration: Dawn carries a suite of sophisticated instruments that will allow us to determine not only what Ceres looks like, but what it’s made of and what its interior structure is. So we're going to learn about the geology and the chemistry, what minerals are on Ceres. All about the nature of this world and it's like a time capsule from the dawn of the solar system.

Image description: The NASA scientist speaks. An animation of Dawn orbiting Ceres appears. An animation representing the dawn of the solar system appears as a bright light in the midst of heavy vapor and particles.

Narration: Dawn's legacy extends beyond a good breakfast. And who knows what surprises we're gonna find at Ceres? I love the smell of xenon in the morning.

Image description: The scene changes back to the NASA scientist preparing to each the Ceres-os cereal. He pulls a toy figure of the Dawn spacecraft out of the cereal box.