e University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland and a Dawn team member.
"With the success of the Discovery Program's Deep Impact and Stardust missions, and the recent and exciting scientific results from the Hubble Space Telescope on Ceres...we were poised to emerge into the asteroid frontier with the Dawn spacecraft," McFadden told SPACE.com.
McFadden said that scientists can better understand asteroids as true protoplanets, "if we could only send the spacecraft there." Furthermore, there are equally intriguing clues to the intricacy of Vesta, a very different asteroid that was also on Dawn's trajectory, she explained.
"There are hundreds of people in this country and in Europe who have worked on the [Dawn] project for four years and had committed another decade to it...and now we are dropped," McFadden said. "What can I say? It makes me cry."
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