This image, taken by the framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows a densely cratered region within Meanderi Crater on Ceres. Elongated craters in the wall of the largest impact feature are likely the result of material slumping down the crater walls. Mounds of material on the crater's right side provide additional evidence of slumping, also called mass wasting.
Meanderi is named for the Ngaing goddess (New Guinea) of taro, sugar cane and other foods.
The image is centered at approximately 39.5 degrees south latitude, 197 degrees east longitude. Dawn captured the scene on Jan. 6, 2016, from its low-altitude mapping orbit (LAMO), at an altitude of 231 miles (371 kilometers) above Ceres. The image resolution is 112 feet (34 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.