Dawn Spacecraft Sees Spots as It Approaches Mysterious Ceres [Slide Show]
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TWIN SPOTS This image of the dwarf planet Ceres, taken by NASA’s Dawn mission on February 19, 2015 from an altitude of 46,000 kilometers, reveals that a previously seen bright spot in a crater is actually two spots... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
FRONT AND BACK As it approaches Ceres for an orbital rendezvous on March 6, Dawn is gaining unprecedented views of the dwarf planet’s surface, such as this almost-complete image of both hemispheres captured on February 19, 2015... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
MAPPING CERES This flat map of Ceres's surface was produced from a mosaic of Dawn images taken from an altitude of 46,000 kilometers on February 19, 2015. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
LORD OF THE ASTEROIDS Ceres drifts in the mostly empty space of the Asteroid Belt in this image from February 4, 2015, captured from a distance of 145,000 kilometers. As diminutive as it may seem in this image, the 950-kilometer-wide dwarf planet is roughly the size of Texas, and represents one third of the asteroid belt’s entire mass... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
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A SHARPER IMAGE Although only 43 pixels across, this image of Ceres’s disk as seen from 237,000 kilometers away by Dawn on January 25, 2015, was the first ever produced that surpassed the previous Hubble observations in resolution... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
PIXELATED CRATERS Taken on January 13, 2015, from a distance of 383,000 kilometers, this Dawn image was processed to reveal some of the first substantial details of Ceres’s craters. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
A VIEW FROM EARTH Gathered by the 10-meter telescopes of the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2006, infrared images of Ceres were used to assemble this rough surface map. The image is colored based on infrared brightness, with blue being the darkest and red being the brightest... Credit: LESIA/ESO/SwRI/W. M. Keck Observatory
HUBBLE’S PORTRAIT Taken in 2004 by the Hubble Space Telescope, this enhanced color image was the best picture available of Ceres before Dawn’s approach to the dwarf planet. Blurry hints of Ceres’s mysterious bright spots are visible... Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Parker (SWRI), P. Thomas (Cornell U.), L. McFadden (U-Md., College Park), and M. Mutchler and Z. Levay (STScI)
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