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Dawn is the first mission to study a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres a few months before the arrival of the New Horizons probe at Pluto in July 2015. Dawn image of Ceres from 13,600 km, May 4, 2015. Ceres comprises a third of the total mass of the asteroid belt.
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 .
Dawn was launched in September 2007 with the mission of studying Ceres and the asteroid 4 Vesta. The spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey mission before leaving for Ceres in late 2012. It went into orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015.
The asteroid Ceres, once thought to be just a large rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, has slushy volcanoes and liquid saltwater beneath its surface that may have formed an underground ocean ...
Sample of asteroid Bennu will help tell us where we came from, scientists hope Pieces of distant, ancient asteroid arrive on Earth from Nasa spacecraft, after travelling billions of miles Skip to ...
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 ...
The Dawn spacecraft has spotted not one, but two bright points on the minor planet Ceres. Newly enhanced images from the probe show two shining spots on the surface. It's not clear exactly what ...
Piazzi named it "Ceres Ferdinandea," after the Roman and Sicilian goddess of grain and King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Sicily. The Ferdinandea part was later dropped for political reasons. Ceres turned out to be the first, and largest, of the asteroids existing within the asteroid belt. Ceres is today called a dwarf planet.