This pair of images shows color-coded maps from NASA’s Dawn mission, revealing the highs and lows of topography on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres.
The map at left is centered on terrain at 60 degrees east longitude; the map at right is centered on 240 degrees east longitude.
The color scale extends about 5 miles (7.5 kilometers) below the surface in indigo to 5 miles (7.5 kilometers) above the surface in white.
The topographic map was constructed from analyzing images from Dawn’s framing camera taken from varying sun and viewing angles. The map was combined with an image mosaic of Ceres and projected as an orthographic projection.
The well-known bright spots in the center of Ceres northern hemisphere in the image at right retain their bright appearance, although they are color-coded in the same green elevation of the crater floor in which they sit.
Note: The elevation scale used for this topographic map product differs slightly from the scale used to create PIA19605. These are preliminary data products; the Dawn science team may revisit the data to standardize the scale at a later date.
Dawn’s mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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.
Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA