BTW, I wasn't suggesting adding anything to DAWN. Obviously that would be ridiculous at this stage of development. I was more interested in their original specs and if they explored any preliminary designs for a ground truth probe.

Back to the physics of the probe, couldn't you spin stablize an impactor? If the spacecraft that ejected the probe has sufficient pointing accuracy it seems like it would be hard to miss a body like ceres. Still, you have to have communication, and power features, and some instruments so of course the probe has to have some minimal complexity and capability for anything useful.

NEAR did rendevous with microgravity asteroid (although not designed as a lander), and the recent Japanese probe failed to get its microprobe to land. But I'm just sort of interested in various situational probe designs. We don't have much experience in landers on various G force bodies, having really only purosefully landed on Mars, Venus, Titan, and the Moon.

It seems like Microgravity bodies like small asteroids might be pretty tricky to land on given odd rotations and the fact that there is (effectively) no orienting gravitational force. On the other hand, since the gravity well is negligible, if you had a nuclear powered probe, why not land and take off again, visiting several bodies?

Obviously a body like the moon with significant gravity 1/6g and no atmosphere is a different problem from Titan, with 1/7G but a lot of atmosphere, and different yet again from Mars and Venus given .4g and .9g and varying atmosphere.

And back to the original question, seems like there could be some unique and effective probe designs for a large asteroid like Ceres with .03g. I'm sure someone has done some designs for such bodies and I guess I'm just curious about various "lithobraking" alternatives.