When Dawn explored the giant protoplanet Vesta from comparable orbits (HAMO1 in 2011 and HAMO2 in 2012), it pointed its scientific instruments at the illuminated ground whenever it was on the dayside. Every time its orbit took it over the nightside, it turned to point its main antenna at Earth to radio its findings to NASA’s Deep Space Network. As we explained last year, however, that is not the plan at Ceres, because of the failure of two of the ship’s reaction wheels. (By electrically changing the speed at which these gyroscope-like devices rotate, Dawn can turn or stabilize itself in the zero-gravity conditions of spaceflight.)

We discussed in January that the flight team has excogitated innovative methods to accomplish and even exceed the original mission objectives regardless of the condition of the wheels, even the two operable ones (which will not be used until the final mapping orbit). Dawn no longer relies on reaction wheels, although when it left Earth in 2007, they were deemed indispensable. The spacecraft’s resilience (which is a direct result of the team’s resourcefulness) is remarkable!

One of the many ingredients in the recipe for turning the potentially devastating loss of the wheels into a solid plan for success has been to rotate the spacecraft less frequently. Therefore, sometimes Dawn will wait patiently for half an orbit (almost 9.5 hours) as it flies above ground cloaked in the deep darkness of night, its instruments pointed at terrain they cannot detect. Other times, it will keep its antenna fixed on Earth without even glancing at the sunlit scenery below, because it can capture the views on other revolutions. This strategy conserves hydrazine, the conventional rocket propellant used by the small jets of the reaction control system in the absence of the wheels. It takes more time, but because Dawn is in orbit, time is not such a limited resource. It will take 12 passages over the illuminated hemisphere, each lasting nearly 9.5 hours, to bring the entirety of the landscape within view of its camera, but we will need a total of 14 full revolutions, or 11 days (29 Cerean days, for those of you using that calendar), to acquire and transmit all the data. The Dawn team calls this 11-day period “11 days,” or sometimes a “cycle.”

In quite a change from the days that there simply didn’t seem to be enough hydrazine onboard to accomplish all of the mission’s ambitious objectives, engineers and the spacecraft itself have collaborated to be so efficient with the precious molecules that they now have some to spare. Therefore, mission planners have recently decided to spend a few more in this mapping orbit. They have added extra turns to allow the robot to communicate with Earth during more of the transits over the nightside than they had previously budgeted. This means Dawn can send the contents of its computer memory to Earth more often and therefore have space to collect and store even more data than originally planned. An 11-day mapping cycle is going to be marvelously productive.