NASA released a new topographic map of the dwarf planet Ceres complete with names and classifications for a number of mountains and craters.
Now that New Horizons is out exploring the rest of the Kuiper Belt on the outer edges of the solar system, NASA has been able to get its other active missions into the news cycle.
According to Space.com, NASA was able to create a detailed map of several formations on the dwarf planet's surface based on observations from the Dawn spacecraft. Ceres is the largest object in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
"The craters we find on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about the same size and density as Ceres. The features are pretty consistent with an ice-rich crust," Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member and geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in a press release.
Chiefly among the newly named cites on Ceres was Occator, which is a crater most notable for housing mysterious bright spots spotted early on in Dawn's observations. The spacecraft is now entering its third orbit of Ceres, moving to 900 miles above the dwarf's surface, three times closer than it was before.
Said Ralf Jaumann, a Dawn science team member at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, in the release: "The impact craters Dantu and Ezinu are extremely deep, while the much larger impact basins Kerwan and Yalode exhibit much shallower depth, indicating increasing ice mobility with crater size and age."
