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Kupalo Crater from LAMO

Jan. 12, 2016
Kupalo Crater, taken Dec. 21, 2016 by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows one of the youngest craters on Ceres. The crater has bright material exposed on its rim and walls, which could be salts. Its flat floor likely formed from impact melt and debris.

This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Kupalo Crater, one of the youngest craters on Ceres. The crater has bright material exposed on its rim and walls, which could be salts. Its flat floor likely formed from impact melt and debris.

Kupalo, which measures 16 miles (26 kilometers) across and is located at southern mid-latitudes, is named for the Slavic god of vegetation and harvest.

Kupalo was imaged earlier in Dawn's science mission at Ceres -- during Survey orbit (see PIA19624) and from the high altitude mapping orbit, or HAMO (see PIA20124).

Dawn took this image on Dec. 21 from its low-altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) at an approximate altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers) above Ceres. The image resolution is 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel.

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.

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