Dawn arriving at Ceres today

Yesterday, Vox gave its readers 6 reasons why NASA's mission to Ceres is a big deal.

Tomorrow, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will reach Ceres, an icy dwarf planet that lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

This event likely won't get the coverage Philae got when it landed on a comet this past November. It might not even get as much attention as a few recent space accidents, such as the explosions of a Virgin Galactic space plane and uncrewed rocket this past October.

That's a shame. Because tomorrow will be the culmination of a seven-year mission to visit something remarkable — a world that's quite close to us, but is such an unknown that, until a month or so ago, the best pictures we had of it looked like a hazy blob.

JPL posted a video earlier this week showing the progression from "a hazy blob" to a cratered world, followed by animation of the orbital insertion that begins today and continues for another month: Dawn Nears Ceres - Approach Images, Movies and Animations.  There is no sound.

NASA's Dawn mission will arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015, and will be the first spacecraft to explore a dwarf planet. Ceres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt. At the time of its discovery in 1801 it was considered a planet and later demoted.

This is the second large asteroid Dawn has visited.  As Vox points out:

A handful of previous missions have used ion thrusters, but Dawn has taken advantage of them to do something unprecedented: it entered Vesta's orbit, left it, and will now enter Ceres', becoming the first spacecraft to ever orbit two different interplanetary objects.

That's one of the six reasons.  Follow over the jump for two more.