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.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has delivered the closest-yet views of Ceres, showing the dwarf planet’s surface in unprecedented detail — including the small world’s mysterious four-mile-high conical mountain. At its current orbital altitude, Dawn takes 11 days to capture and return images of Ceres’ whole surface at a resolution of 450 feet (140 metres) per pixel.
New and very precise observations using the HARPS spectrograph with the ESO 3.6-metre telescope in Chile have not only detected the motion of the enigmatic bright spots on Ceres due to the dwarf planet’s rotation about its axis, but also found unexpected additional variations suggesting that the material of the spots is volatile and evaporates in sunlight.
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