Dawn spacecraft sends sharpest images of Ceres yet

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been sending back images of the dwarf planet Ceres for several months now, but the latest are the clearest ones to date. Dawn entered close orbit of Ceres back on March 6th. 

The planet is now believed to be 584 miles in diameter (down from a pre-mission estimate of 590). It’s located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which makes it the only dwarf planet inside the orbit of Pluto. This new set of photos, taken from an orbital altitude of 915 miles, show off Ceres’ tall, conical mountain, as well as some braided fractures and the appearance of crater formation.

“Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration. The spacecraft’s view is now three times as sharp as in its previous mapping orbit, revealing exciting new details of this intriguing dwarf planet,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, in a statement.

A mountain ridge (near the lower left) lies in the Urvata crater. The image at the top of this article shows a 4-mile-high conical mountain. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Currently, Dawn can record and send back images in 11-day cycles, each of which consists of 14 orbits. NASA said the spacecraft is using its framing camera to map the surface of Ceres for 3D modeling, and that each image has a resolution of 450 feet per pixel and represents less than one percent of the surface. The spacecraft is also using its visible and infrared spectrometer to collect mineral data.
This video, released a few weeks ago, lets you tour the surface of Ceres and get a closer look at the mysterious bright spots in the Occator crater and the aforementioned cone-shaped mountain: