English: PIA19617: Occator Crater: Enhanced View

This frame from an animation from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows intriguing bright spots on Ceres lie in a crater named Occator, which is about 60 miles (90 kilometers) across and 2 miles (4 kilometers) deep.

 Target Name:  Ceres  Is a satellite of:  Dwarf Planet  Mission:  Dawn   Spacecraft:  Dawn  Instrument:  Framing Camera   Product Size:  1920 x 1080 pixels (w x h)   Produced By:  JPL   Full-Res TIFF:  PIA19617.tif (1.858 MB)  Full-Res JPEG:  PIA19617.jpg (188.7 kB)   Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original) Original Caption Released with Image: The intriguing brightest spots on Ceres lie in a crater named Occator, which is about 60 miles (90 kilometers) across and 2 miles (4 kilometers) deep.

This image comes from an animation, shown in PIA19619, generated using data from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Vertical relief has been exaggerated by a factor of five. Exaggerating the relief helps scientists understand and visualize the topography much more easily, and highlights features that are sometimes subtle.

Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgments, see http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.