Some craters and features have been officially named. NASA asks people to submit name submissions.
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See a full list of Ceres’ named features here. It is labeled with names of features approved by the worldwide Astronomical Union. The latest batch of 18 names is a very multicultural bunch, devoted largely to Earth-based deities.
In the case of Charon, who was the ferryman and took souls across the river Styx, names of Pluto’s moon Charon were from mythical and fictional stories of travel and exploration.
Topographic elevation map of Ceres showing newly-named craters.
To cite few examples, a 20-mile-wide crater has been named Haulani, a Hawaiian plant goddess; a 75-mile-wide and 3-mile deep crater has been named after Dantu, a Ghanaian God associated with planting of corn. “The features are pretty consistent with an ice-rich crust”, Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member and geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in a press release.
Kerwan and Yalode: Each over twice as big as Dantu or Ezinu, these craters are named for the Hopi spirit of sprouting maize and an African Dahomey goddess worshipped for the harvest. Positioned a mere 900 miles over the dwarf planet’s surface, Dawn will continue to take images and collect spectral data, hopefully unravelling the origin of those winking bright spots, and teaching us more about this unusual little world’s past. The map at left is centered on terrain at 60 degrees east longitude; the map at right is centered on 240 degrees east longitude. As it turns out, it has done such a good job identifying craters and mountain peaks that NASA scientists are now confident to produce a map revealing the dwarf planet’s geography. The well-known bright spots in the center of Ceres northern hemisphere in the image at right retain their bright appearance, although they are color-coded in the same green elevation of the crater floor in which they sit.
Ceres, with a diameter of only 548 miles, is about 40% the size of Pluto and the largest object in the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.
Urvara: Far south of Occator, Urvara is around 100 miles (160 km) across and 3 miles (6 km) deep.
Haulani, named after the Hawaiian plant goddess, has a diameter of about 20 miles (30 km).
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Dawn is now spiraling toward Ceres, and will be entering its third orbit, three times closer than its previous one, in mid-August. They were produced on June 6, 2015. Come March 2015, it reached dwarf planet Ceres and planted itself in its orbit.
