[meteorite-list] Ceres' Bright Spots Come Back Into View

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4558

Ceres' Bright Spots Come Back Into View
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
April 20, 2015

The two brightest spots on dwarf planet Ceres, which have fascinated scientists 
for months, are back in view in the newest images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. 
Dawn took these images on April 14 and 15 from a vantage point 14,000 
miles (22,000 kilometers) above Ceres' north pole.

An animation and still image are available here:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA19064

The images show the brightest spot and its companion clearly standing 
out against their darker surroundings, but their composition and sources 
are still un-known. Scientists also see other interesting features, including 
heavy cratering. As Dawn gets closer to Ceres, surface features will continue 
to emerge at in-creasingly better resolution.

Dawn has now finished delivering the images that have helped mission planners 
maneuver the spacecraft to its first science orbit and prepare for subsequent 
ob-servations. All of the approach operations have executed flawlessly 
and kept Dawn on course and on schedule. Beginning April 23, Dawn will 
spend about three weeks in a near-circular orbit around Ceres, taking 
observations from 8,400 miles (13,500 kilometers) above the surface. On 
May 9, Dawn will begin to make its way to lower orbits to improve the 
view and provide higher-resolution observa-tions.

"The approach imaging campaign has completed successfully by giving us 
a pre-liminary, tantalizing view of the world Dawn is about to start exploring 
in detail. It has allowed us to start asking some new and intriguing questions," 
said Marc Rayman, Dawn's mission director and chief engineer, based at 
NASA's Jet Pro-pulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

On March 6, Dawn became the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet, 
and the first to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. Scientists will be 
comparing Ceres to giant asteroid Vesta, which Dawn studied from 2011 
to 2012, in order to gain insights about the formation of our solar system. 
Both Vesta and Ceres, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and 
Jupiter, were on their way to becoming planets before their development 
was interrupted.

Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate 
in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, 
managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. 
UCLA is re-sponsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., 
in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace 
Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian 
Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international 
partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgements, 
visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission

For more information about Dawn, visit:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov


Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau 
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425
Elizabeth.Landau at jpl.nasa.gov



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