Tawals Crater

This image taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows a region located next to the northwestern rim of Urvara Crater on Ceres. This terrain displays a rugged texture also found within Urvara. Multiple Dawn observations, in particular neutron spectroscopy (which measures the hydrogen content in the regolith) and flow features, have shown that water ice is present near the surface above 40 degrees north latitude, where these features are found. Therefore, the rugged texture may result from the high strength exhibited by ice at the temperatures found at mid- and high latitudes on Ceres.

The prominent crater (5.0 miles, 8.8 kilometers in diameter) at right in this picture is called Tawals. Its sharp rim suggests it was created by a relatively recent impact into a relatively strong material. A different view of this crater can be found in PIA20941.

Tawals Crater is named after the Polish god of the fields and the tilling.

Dawn took this image during its extended mission on August 25, 2016, from its low-altitude mapping orbit, or LAMO, at a distance of about 240 miles (385 kilometers) above the surface. The center coordinates of this image are 40 degrees south latitude, 237 degrees east longitude.

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, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.

For a complete list of Dawn mission participants, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.

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