Why didn’t Dawn land on dwarf planet Ceres?
Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science
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The Requirement of Two Decades Is Long Enough
Two decades is long enough. We don't want to contaminate that pristine environment with dawn's terrestrial materials, much like we saw cassine end up crashing into saturn instead of taking the chance that it would run into titan or europa and celadus. The other one is dawn was not physically capable of accomplishing a controlled landing. Once again, seres is not just one of these chunks of rock. It's a big place, and its gravity is significant.
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