no one seems to have noticed this
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5950/275

Well, well, well! Guess it's extremely premature to start lobbying for an XM for Dawn, but hopefully some wheels are turning in that regard already.

I discussed about this with Mark Rayman a few weeks ago and he told me that

Ancient memory suggest that 2 Pallas orbits in an inclined orbit. If the memory chips are still functioning, this would make it hard...

I was thinking that it was maybe a few degrees off the ecliptic, but it's actually 35(!) freakin' degrees! Good trace memory, VJ.

Guess a flyby by Dawn might still be technically possible if Pallas is doing a plane crossing at the right time & place with respect to the spacecraft, but the whole thing sounds unlikely to the point of ain't-gonna-happen. Oh, well.

From Wikipedia

There was a blurb about a Pallas encounter that briefly appeared on Astronomy Now's website back before DAWN launched, but it was pulled within a few hours of being posted.

There has been talk from time to time about Dawn extended missions. The official blurb put out awhile ago is that any planning now is premature. The team will want to see how long they spend at Ceres, how much fuel is left, and what the efficiency of the engines will be at that distance from the sun. Very different than normal ballistic missions.

I wonder if the Indians or Chinese have considered a flyby of 2 Pallas? Indian and Chinese missions to the Moon and Mars will never generate the public interest that would result from sending a spacecraft past a new Solar System body.

2 Pallas is one of the biggest objects in the Asteroid belt and so I am sure would have interesting and varied landscapes. For me the mission that really put the Japanese Space Agency on the map was Hayabusa because Itokawa was unlike any Solar System body visited before.

Note also this LPSC paper http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2009/pdf/2421.pdf
and its thanks to "STSCI and the Dawn mission for supporting this work."

A series of barely funny but fairly inappropriate posts have been culled.

On ArXiv today: Physical Properties of (2) Pallas

Huh. Almost the same average density as Mars.

Hate to say it, but it's probably dry as a bone....metal-rich, though.

Thanks very much for the pointer to that article, Paolo.

Of interest to some of the 3D modeling types here might be this website mentioned in the article, which has a database that currently includes 179 shape models for 112 asteroids.

http://astro.troja.mff.cuni.cz/projects/asteroids3D/web.php

--Emily