NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Captures Best-Ever View of Dwarf Planet

[n2doc]

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the sharpest images ever seen of the dwarf planet Ceres. The images were taken 147,000 miles (237,000 kilometers) from Ceres on Jan. 25, and represent a new milestone for a spacecraft that soon will become the first human-made probe to visit a dwarf planet.

"We know so little about our vast solar system, but thanks to economical missions like Dawn, those mysteries are being solved," said Jim Green, Planetary Science Division Director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

At 43 pixels wide, the new images are more than 30 percent higher in resolution than those taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004 at a distance of over 150 million miles (about 241 million kilometers). The resolution is higher because Dawn is traveling through the solar system to Ceres, while Hubble remains fixed in Earth orbit. The new Dawn images come on the heels of initial navigation images taken Jan. 13 that reveal a white spot on the dwarf planet and the suggestion of craters. Hubble images also had glimpsed a white spot on the dwarf planet, but its nature is still
unknown.

"Ceres is a 'planet' that you've probably never heard of," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We're excited to learn all about it with Dawn and share our discoveries with the world."

more
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=48703

[packman]

1. Had to look it up on Wikipedia

I was about to unload on you designating a new "planet"- but, yah, it has that designation----

"Ceres (minor-planet designation 1 Ceres) /ˈsɪəriːz/[17] is the largest object in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is composed of rock and ice, is 950 km (590 mi) in diameter, and contains a third of the mass of the asteroid belt. It is the largest asteroid, and the only dwarf planet in the inner Solar System. It was the first asteroid to be discovered, on January 1, 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo, though at first it was considered to be a planet. The unmanned Dawn spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015.[18]"

[n2doc]

2. That's their title- I saw no reason to toss it n/t

[Johnny Rash]

3. This is great stuff!

Seeing these pictures for the first time has an unintended effect: It has shrunk the size of our Solar system considerably.