Dawn at Vesta

Completed 2021-06-07. Available releases:

This is my artist impression of the real-life NASA spacecraft Dawn at the minor-planet / asteroid Vesta. The Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta on 2011-07-16 and stayed through 2012-09-05, after which it went on to study Ceres, over which the (now defunct) spacecraft remains in orbit today. Dawn's main propulsion system was an ion engine accelerating Xenon, which you can see as a cyan trail in the image. It was not the first spacecraft to use such a propulsion scheme, but was a relatively high-stakes application and helped to make it more reputable.

Artistically, this is just a fairly basic digital painting, done with Krita. The entire scene was done with hand-painting / filtering. I drew everything, including the asteroid itself. (No seriously, zoom in, you can see the brush strokes.)

In real life, the stars would likely not be visible at all, but I felt like I had to take a bit of artistic license and show a few in the darker areas, just to give the asteroid some more definition.

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