NASA's Dawn Gets Closer To Potentially Habitable Dwarf Planet Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has already delivered the first details of craters on the surface of Ceres as it draws closer to its historical rendezvous with the dwarf planet.

Dawn will be the first ever probe to visit a dwarf planet and has been heading for Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, since it left its first mission objective, Vesta, in 2012.

Its new images show the dwarf planet at 27 pixels across, around three times better than the calibration images taken in early December. The pictures are still only around 80 per cent of the resolution of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004, but Dawn is about to get much closer to the dwarf world.

At the end of January, its images will surpass Hubble resolution, bringing scientists the first clues about this icy body in the asteroid belt, which some academics believe may harbor a subsurface ocean. That puts Ceres in the same bracket as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus – warm, wet planetary bodies that are potentially habitable.

" We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that, " said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters," added Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.

Ceres sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has an average diameter of 590 miles and is thought to be made up of a large proportion of water – though how much of that water is liquid is still in question.

The dwarf planet is Dawn’s second port of call, after it delivered over 30,000 pictures and huge amounts of data and insight into Vesta, the second most massive object in the same asteroid belt. The probe orbited the 326-mile diameter space rock from 2011 to 2012, but thanks to its ion propulsion system, still has enough juice to be the first ever spacecraft to orbit two deep-space destinations.

Ceres has offered tantalising hints about its make-up, including the presence of water vapour in its thin atmosphere and these first hints of craters on its surface.

"The team is very excited to examine the surface of Ceres in never-before-seen detail," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We look forward to the surprises this mysterious world may bring."

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