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Crater with Scarps in LAMO

Jan. 12, 2016
This Cerean crater, which is covered in ridges and steep slopes, called scarps, was captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Dec. 23, 2015. These features likely resulted when the crater partly collapsed during its formation.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft viewed this Cerean crater, which is covered in ridges and steep slopes, called scarps on Dec. 23, 2015. These features likely resulted when the crater partly collapsed during its formation. The curvilinear nature of the scarps resembles those on the floor of Rheasilvia, the giant impact crater on Vesta, which Dawn orbited from 2011 to 2012.

The 20-mile-wide (32-kilometer-wide) crater is located just west of the larger, named crater Dantu (see PIA20193), at northern mid-latitudes on Ceres. Both of these impact features were captured during Dawn's Survey orbit (see PIA19609).

Dawn took this image 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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