Asteroid Mission Returns to Launch Pad

via Space.com, the oft delayed Dawn space probe, set to visit two of the larger asteroids in the solar system, returned yesterday to the launch pad.

"Engineers hoisted the space agency's Dawn asteroid probe atop its Delta 2 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station following a series of launch delays and scrubs earlier this summer.

"From here, the only way to go is up," said Dawn project manager Keyur Patel, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. "We are looking forward to putting some space between Dawn and Mother Earth and making some space history."

The probe, delayed from a July lift-off by bad weather and to allow for the launch of both the shuttle's last mission as well as the the Mars Polar Lander, should rendezvous with the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and later the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest rock of the asteroid debris filed found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.