NASA has shared the closest view of Ceres available to date with a new series of images, and among them is one showing the dwarf planet's pyramid-shaped mountain.
Revealed in a news release, NASA also showed photos from the Dawn spacecraft depicting Ceres' craters and surface fractures. Dawn is currently orbiting Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, 915 miles above its surface.
Dawn is the first spacecraft to ever orbit a dwarf planet and has been lessening its altitude gradually since arriving there in March of this year. Mission managers are currently trying to gauge Ceres' gravitational pull to determine how far they can lower Dawn's orbital path.
"Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration. The spacecraft's view is now three times as sharp as in its previous mapping orbit, revealing exciting new details of this intriguing dwarf planet," Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in the release.
For perspective on how large Ceres and its large mountain are, Time noted that the dwarf planet is roughly three-quarters the size of Texas at just 591 miles across. Its mountain is four miles tall, which is nearly the size of Mt. Everest. If Ceres were the size of Earth and its mountain scaled accordingly, it would measure just a tick under 50 miles high, Time pointed out.
So while Ceres' mountain may not be anything one cannot see on Earth, its size relative to the dwarf planet is truly otherworldly.
(H/T Time)
