This image of Ceres, taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, features a large, steep-sided mountain and several intriguing bright spots. The mountain’s height is estimated to be about 4 miles (6 kilometers), which is a revision of the previous estimate of 3 miles (5 kilometers). It is among the tallest features seen on Ceres so far.
The image was obtained on June 25, 2015, from an altitude of 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Ceres and has a resolution of 1,400 feet (410 meters) per pixel.
Dawn’s mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. 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