This new view of Ceres’ surface captured May 23rd and seen from a distance of 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometres) shows finer details coming into view as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spirals down to increasingly lower orbits. Resolution in the image is about 1,600 feet (480 metres) per pixel. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.The view shows numerous secondary craters, formed by the re-impact of debris strewn from larger impact sites. Smaller surface details like this are becoming visible with increasing clarity as Dawn spirals lower in its campaign to map Ceres.
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.
Like its cousin the Kepler space telescope, NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres has run out of gas, ending a remarkably successful 11-year mission to the two largest members of the asteroid belt.
Astronomers have found a dwarf planet three times farther away from the Sun than Pluto, making it the most distant known object in the solar system. Designated V774104, the body is 500 to 1000 kilometres in diameter and is currently 15.4 billion kilometres, or 103 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, but its exact orbit is yet to be determined.
Features on dwarf planet Ceres that piqued the interest of scientists throughout 2015 stand out in exquisite detail in the latest images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which recently reached its lowest-ever altitude at Ceres. Dawn took these images near its current altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers) between 19 and 23 December 2015.