New Event Time NASA To Unveil Vesta Images At News Conference

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news conference on Monday, Aug. 1, at
noon EDT, to discuss the Dawn spacecraft's successful orbit insertion
around Vesta on July 15 and unveil the first full-frame images from
Dawn's framing camera. The news conference will be held in the Von
Karman auditorium at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 4800 Oak
Grove Dr., Pasadena, Calif. Journalists also may ask questions from
participating NASA locations or join by phone.

To obtain dial-in information, journalists must contact JPL's Media
Relations Office at 818-354-5011 by 8 a.m. PDT on Aug. 1.

NASA Television and the agency's website will broadcast the event. It
also will be carried live on Ustream, with a live chat box available, at:

http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

The news conference panelists are:
-- Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator, Science Mission
Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-- Charles Elachi, director, JPL
-- Marc Rayman, chief engineer and mission manager, JPL
-- Christopher Russell, Dawn principal investigator, University of
California, Los Angeles
-- Holger Sierks, framing camera team member, Max Planck Society,
Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany
-- Enrico Flamini, chief scientist, Italian Space Agency (ASI), Rome, Italy

Although Dawn is collecting some science data now, the mission's
intensive collection of information will begin in early August.
Observations of the giant asteroid Vesta will provide unprecedented
data to help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar
system. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid in the main
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. After spending one year
orbiting Vesta, Dawn will travel to a second destination, the dwarf
planet Ceres, and arrive there in February 2015.

For more information about Dawn, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/dawn

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

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