Informative Speech On Aliens

Hello Congress, my name is Annika Jurgilewicz and I am NASA’s lead scientist for the Dawn mission. As you may know, Dawn is a space probe that was launched in September 2007 with the purpose of studying Ceres and Vesta, two of the three known protoplanets in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter1-17. Dawn’s main purpose is to help discover how the solar system formed1. Vesta and Ceres were specifically chosen because they are two very diverse planetary bodies that are essentially frozen as dwarf planets in their teenage years. This gives scientists a unique look into what some of the terrestrial planets may have been like in their early formation1. Vesta is very “primitive and rocky1” while Ceres is “water bearing and icy1”. By studying

Until the Dawn mission, spacecrafts were powered on rockets that used chemical reactions to move them through space. Although forceful, rockets were short lived and inefficient. Dawn is powered on ion propulsion, an engine system that uses electricity to push it through space. Ion propulsion allows Dawn to increase to high velocities that are much faster than chemical engines and is a lot more efficient2,3. Because of it’s efficiency, ion propulsion can last for many years longer than a chemical rocket. This exciting new technology opens the gateway for future space

This crater was estimated to be formed around one billion years ago and was expected to have ejected 250,000 cubic miles of material9 which is said by senior writer Mike Wall from space.com as “enough to fill the grand canyon 1,000 times over”15. Dawn’s imaging system revealed that Vesta is of the same geological makeup as 5% of the meteors found on Earth, referred to as HED (howardite-eucrite-diogenite) meteorites. Meaning that when this crater was formed billions of years ago some of the ejected rock smashed into Earth to become a part of our planet3,15. This is important because scientists now have a definitive connection between an inner terrestrial planet and the asteroid