Handsome dwarf planet Ceres pictures released by NASA

From about 385km above Ceres’ surface, Dawn snapped detailed shots of the Kupalo Crater, one of the youngest on the dwarf planet, which has the seem bright blemishes as the widely seen Occator Crater.

Kupalo Crater, one of Ceres’ youngest craters, shows off several fascinating features at the high image resolution of 120 feet (35 m) per pixel.

Dawn spacecraft took the images near its lowest ever altitude to Ceres at 240 miles (385 kilometers) from Ceres, between December 19 and 23, 2015.

“This cracking may have resulted from the cooling of impact melt, or when the crater floor was uplifted after the crater formed”, NASA officials wrote in the statement.

Kupalo, which is 16 miles (26 km) across and is located at southern mid-latitudes, is named after the traditional Slavic mythological god of harvest and vegetation.

“This crater and its recently-formed deposits will be a prime target of study for the team as Dawn continues to explore Ceres in its final mapping phase”, said Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Another photo shows fractures on the floor of Ceres’ 78-mile-wide (126 km) Dantu Crater, which are similar to cracks seen within a big young crater on the moon called Tycho. The scarps probably formed when the crater partly collapsed during or shortly after the impact that created it, NASA officials said.

According to Dawn Mission Director, Marc Rayman, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his latest Mission Status Update: “After completing its orbit maintenance maneuver on January 8, Dawn spent much of the weekend with its main antenna aimed at Earth as it revolved around Ceres, beaming its latest data to NASA’s Deep Space Network”.

Dawn became NASA’s first mission to a dwarf planet, and the first outside our planet’s immediate neighborhood to manage a visit to two distinct targets in our solar system. Dawn orbited the 330-mile-wide (530 km) Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012, when the probe departed for the 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres. The end of the prime mission will be June 30, 2016.

‘Everywhere we look in these new low- altitude observations, we see awesome landforms that speak to the unique character of this most unbelievable world’.

This Dec. 21 picture from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows the fractured floor of Dantu Crater on Ceres.

A 32-kilomoter (20-mile) crater (pictured) has geological features known as “scarps”, steep slopes and ridges similar to those on asteroid and protoplanet Vesta’s Rheasilvia Crater. Scientists are leaning toward identifying them as salt deposits, and now there’s a new line of evidence that could help tell the tale definitively. It was the first object to be discovered in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, so of course there was great excitement surrounding Ceres’ discovery.

As long as Dawn’s reaction wheels are operational, engineers buy more time for the mission by conserving hydrazine, the spacecraft still needs for some pointing maneuvers.

Initially classified as a planet, Ceres was later called an asteroid, and designated a dwarf planet in 2006.