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Ceres' shape is controlled mainly by gravity and spin, with only a 3% departure from hydrostatic equilibrium. Its best-fit shape is a triaxial ellipsoid with dimensions a = 483.1 km, b = 481.0, km and c = 445.9 km, with c being the north-south axis and a and b the semimajor and semiminor equatorial axes.
Ceres (minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid , discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily , and announced as a new planet .
This 100-kilometer-thick mantle (23%–28% of Ceres by mass; 50% by volume) contains 200 million cubic kilometers of water, which is more than the amount of fresh water on Earth. This result is supported by the observations made by the Keck telescope in 2002 and by evolutionary modeling.
Months ago, NASA's Dawn spacecraft began capturing images of Ceres, and among the many intriguing surface features it has discovered is a rather mysterious conical mountain. The agency announced ...
The largest of these may have a hydrostatic-equilibrium shape, but most are irregular. Most of the trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) listed with a radius smaller than 200 km have " assumed sizes based on a generic albedo of 0.09" since they are too far away to directly measure their sizes with existing instruments.
In 1970, millions of Americans concerned about the environment observed the first 'Earth Day.' Forty-four years later, the tradition and message of conserving our beautiful planet is still going ...
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Ceres is saturated with impact craters.Many have a central pit or bright spot. In the first batch of 17 names approved by the IAU, craters north of 20° north latitude had names beginning with A–G (with Asari being the furthest north), those between 20° north and south latitude beginning with H–R, and those further south beginning with S–Z (with Zadeni being the furthest south).