Dawn at Ceres

The exploration of dwarf planet Ceres is currently being undertaken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Images that the spacecraft Dawn had sent back in December 2014 had been used for calibration purposes. Now the latest series of images received by NASA will be used as navigational aids. In the next few weeks Dawn will be able to transmit even more detailed images as it gets captured by the orbit of Ceres and begins to spiral closer to the surface of the planet.

Before Dawn reached Ceres, the best captured images of the dwarf planet had been taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004. Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California feels that Dawn’s images will surpass Hubble’s resolution at the next imaging opportunity in end January 2015.

Ceres lies between Mars and Jupiter. It is the largest astral body in the main asteroid belt that exits in that region of the solar system. It has an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), and is thought to contain a large amount of ice. Dawn is attempting a 16 month science project which will study Ceres and help us gain more information about this rock in the sky.