Dawn Cruise Options

[SkyeLab]

Pushing out of Earth orbit now...........

[tasp]

I will reiterate my ignorance about such matters, but will still post a question.

Let's say the Dawn ion drive accels the craft nominally at .001 G right now (neglecting slow increase in accel with fuel mass depletion) and let's say every one in the front office monitoring the engine is happy to sign off at running it in the range of .00085 to .00115 G.

And the office crew is ok with adjusting the throttle from time to time, so long as Mars encounter and Vesta arrival (or was Ceres first ? no matter) happen on schedule, and the average accel is .001 for optimal fuel utilization.

So, by tweaking the throttle only, in the narrow approved range, with a minimum impact to our amazing flight of discovery to Vesta and Ceres, how far off the 'nominal track' can the probe get, and does this resulting 'lens' shaped area in the graph (assuming frame of reference w/ Dawn) take us near anything known and interesting ??

For example, from Mars to Vesta, we accel at lower approved G limit 1/2 way and then go rest of the way at higher approved rate (allowing for the trajectory smiths to approve limits, of course) or we accel 1/2 way at higher G limit, then at lower limit the rest of the way. This gives us an area (instead of a line) along the way to Vesta we can explore for interesting objects to encounter for 'free'. (other than the brain wear and tear it takes to figure this out)

So is this already obvious to everyone and has been found to be undesirable for some reason I haven't figured out yet, or does this put a toe in the door for a free extra object to look at ??

( I am assuming the area potentially available with this technique compared to the known number of asteroids yields a figure of >1 for # of objects on average expected to be in an area of that size, but if it is more like .001, then it looks like I have my answer . . . )