A new map of the dwarf planet Ceres provided by NASA's Dawn spacecraft reveals a diverse terrain of deep craters and tall mountains.
Dawn is now on its third mapping orbit, and the most recent data it collected showed distances of up to nine miles between the bottom of craters and mountain peaks on Ceres, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported. Ceres has a diameter of 584 miles (about 40 percent the size of Pluto, making it the largest object in the asteroid belt.
"The craters we find on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about the same size and density as Ceres. The features are pretty consistent with an ice-rich crust," said Dawn science team member Paul Schenk, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston.
Some of Ceres' craters now have official names thanks to the International Astronomical Union. The name Occator was given the crater that is known for hosting Ceres' brightest spots, the cause of which has been a highly publicized mystery. A smaller crater that also contains bright material was dubbed Haulani. Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer revealed this crater is cooler in temperature than the area surrounding it. The craters Dantu and Ezinu are both about 75 miles in diameter, which is about half the size of the crater Kerwan.
"The impact craters Dantu and Ezinu are extremely deep, while the much larger impact basins Kerwan and Yalode exhibit much shallower depth, indicating increasing ice mobility with crater size and age," said Ralf Jaumann, a Dawn science team member at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin.
In its third science orbit, Dawn is currently about 900 miles from Ceres, which is about three times closer than it was in its previous orbit.
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