The region shown here is located between 13° and 51° north latitude and 182° and 228° east longitude. The image has been projected onto a globe of Ceres, which accounts for the small notch of black at upper right.
OpNav9 is the ninth and final set of Dawn images of Ceres taken primarily for navigation purposes.
Scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission team are learning more about the structure and behaviour of Pluto’s complex atmosphere by discovering new attributes of its extensive haze layers. The hazes were first discovered by New Horizons in July 2015, as the spacecraft swept past Pluto and made its historic first exploration of the mysterious dwarf planet.
Since its arrival at dwarf planet Ceres on 6 March this year, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been slowly spiralling closer to this enigmatic little world. Mission scientist are nearer finding explanations for the intriguing bright spots in a crater named Occator and why an isolated mountain — as high as any in North America — is sitting in the middle of nowhere.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has continued its survey of the dwarf planet Ceres this year, discovering rock-bound ice hidden just beneath the airless world’s rugged surface and a handful of icy outcrops inside craters in the northern hemisphere, raising hopes that Ceres could have once held a buried habitable ocean of liquid water.
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