Dawn Spacecraft Captures Closest View of Ceres Yet

The dwarf planet Ceres has a mountain that is anything but diminutive. The mountain, located in the southern hemisphere, stands 4 miles (6 kilometers) high.

The fresh pictures show a well-defined perimeter and sharp slopes with bright streaks running down them. The image was taken on August 19, 2015.

The terrain of dwarf planet Ceres comes into much clearer focus, but remains mysterious in the latest transmission from the Dawn spacecraft.

“Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration”. It will map Ceres six times before it comes in for a closer orbit of 230 miles above the surface in October. The tiny world, which is being studied by NASA’s Dawn orbiter, also has a very interesting mountain.

The spacecraft is using its framing camera to extensively map the surface, enabling 3-D modeling.

The images, available in the gallery below at a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel, are said to be the closest and most detailed views of the dwarf planet so far. While imaging the surface, the craft’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer is analyzing the chemical makeup – helping researchers back on Earth better understand Ceres’ mineral composition. Urvara is a name derived from an Indian and Iranian deity of plants and fields. The crater’s diameter is 101 miles (163 km). This view was acquired on August 19, 2015, from a distance of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers).

The closer we get to Ceres, the largest object in our solar system’s asteroid belt, the stranger it becomes.

Dawn has been orbiting Ceres since March and will continue studying the dwarf planet through June 2016.

The $466 million Dawn spacecraft left Earth in September 2007 and orbited the massive asteroid Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012.

The Gaue crater on the dwarf planet Ceres as seen by the Dawn spacecraft.