The photos were captured by the Dawn mission spacecraft from 1470 kilometers away, yet they show impressive detail of the planet’s surface.
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Ceres is the only dwarf planet located within the inner solar system, residing between Mars and Jupiter.
The pictures present the planet’s geography in “unprecedented element” together with a mountain, craters and fractures on the floor.
NASA showed the world the most detailed images thus far of the dwarf planet Ceres. So far every images taken by the craft represents 1% of the planet’s surface. Each of those 11-day cycles 14 orbits, the agency added, and over the next eight weeks, the spacecraft will successfully map the dwarf planet’s entire surface a total of six times.
Daybreak is the primary mission to go to a dwarf planet.
At the same time, Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer is collecting data that will give scientists a better understanding of the minerals found on Ceres’ surface.
Also, as the distance of the dwarf planet is very long, it takes approximately 11 days for the images to be captured and broadcast back to NASA.
Dawn chief engineer and mission director Marc Rayman from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California said, “Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration”.
New NASA photos released this week reveal that there is a lone four-mile-high mountain – once dubbed “The Great Pyramid” – rising out of bare plain on the dwarf planet Ceres that has unusual brightly reflective streaks along its sides. It is hoped that the proximity will allow scientists to gain enough data to figure out the dwarf planet’s little mysteries.
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Dawn will begin spiraling toward this final orbit in late October, which will be at an altitude of 230 miles (375 kilometers), according to NASA. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
