1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
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Dawn, a now-retired space probe assigned to study two of the protoplanets of Vesta and Ceres in the asteroid belt, launched on Sept. 27, 2007. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, the first spacecraft to visit either Vesta or Ceres, and the first to visit a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres in March 2015, a few months before New Horizons flew by Pluto in July 2015. The Dawn mission was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with spacecraft components contributed by partners from Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It was the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion, which enabled it to enter and leave the orbit of two celestial bodies. Previous multi-target missions using conventional drives, such as the Voyager program, were restricted to flybys. On Nov. 1, 2018, NASA announced that the Dawn spacecraft had finally exhausted all of its hydrazine fuel, thus ending its mission, and the satellite is currently in an uncontrolled state about Ceres.
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