At Astrotech workers check the movement of the Dawn spacecraft toward the upper stage booster at right.

At Astrotech, workers check the movement of the Dawn spacecraft, at left, toward the upper stage booster at right. The two elements will be mated for launch.
Dawn's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail the largest protoplanets that have remained intact since their formations: asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. They reside in the extensive zone between Mars and Jupiter together with many other smaller bodies, called the asteroid belt. Photo credit: NASA/George Shelton