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By far the largest object within the belt is the dwarf planet Ceres. The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter ...
First likely dwarf planet visited by a spacecraft, largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft 4 Vesta: 525.4: March 29, 1807: Dawn: 2011–2012: 210: 0.76: Dawn broke orbit on 5 September 2012 and headed to Ceres, where it arrived in March 2015: First "big four" asteroid visited by a spacecraft, largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft at the ...
The listed objects currently include most objects in the asteroid belt and moons of the giant planets in this size range, but many newly discovered objects in the outer Solar System are missing, such as those included in the following reference. [58]
Watch live as a Nasa spacecraft returns to Earth with the largest asteroid sample in history on Sunday 24 September. After a seven-year, four-billion-mile journey across space, the ambitious NASA ...
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 .
Occator / ɒ ˈ k eɪ t ər / is an impact crater located on Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that contains "Spot 5", the brightest of the bright spots observed by the Dawn spacecraft. It was known as "Region A" in ground-based images taken by the W. M. Keck Observatory on ...
At a diameter of 964 km, Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt and comprises about one-third of the belt's total mass. Ceres possesses sufficient gravity to form a rounded, ellipsoid shape, suggesting that it is close to being in hydrostatic equilibrium [ 6 ] —one of the conditions for defining a dwarf planet according to the ...
An asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has roughly a 0.28% chance of hitting Earth in about eight years, NASA says — though at one point earlier its estimate reached as high as 3.1% ...