Die Welt

US space agency NASA has launched its ‘Dawn’ space probe on an eight-year mission to study two asteroids for what they can tell scientists about the origins of our solar system.

After several delays since July, the probe blasted off within the launch window at 13.34 Central European Summer Time from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a Delta II rocket. The sky was partly overcast and the event televised.

‘Dawn’, equipped with two German cameras, is to travel to the asteroid belt - the division between the inner and outer solar system - which contains hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris orbiting the Sun from the time when the planets were formed. She is to study Vesta and Ceres, the two largest asteroids in the solar system which are between 320 and 450 million kilometres from the Sun. Scientists expect to make new discoveries of how the planets were formed.

The two on-board cameras were developed by the Institute for Planetaty Research at the German Aerospace Centre in Berlin-Adlershof and by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research at Katienburg-Lindau.