Dawn is a NASA spacecraft launched in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, the first spacecraft to visit either Vesta or Ceres, and the first to visit a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres in March 2015. Dawn entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey mission before leaving for Ceres in late 2012. It then entered orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015. On October 19, 2017, NASA announced the mission would continue until Dawn’s hydrazine fuel supply was used up. On November 1, 2018, NASA announced that the Dawn spacecraft had finally exhausted all of its hydrazine fuel, thus ending its mission. The satellite remains in an uncontrolled orbit around Ceres. The Dawn mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with spacecraft components contributed by European partners from Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It was the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion, which enabled it to enter and leave the orbit of two celestial bodies. Previous multi-target missions using conventional drives, such as the Voyager program, were restricted to flybys.
