In this image of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, a younger, fresher crater (at center right) lies to next to the older, larger crater named Messor (at lower left). Messor, which is named for the Roman god of the harvesting and cutting of grain, measures about 25 miles (40 kilometers) diameter. The scene is located in the northern hemisphere of Ceres.
Dawn took this image on February 3, 2016, in its low-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of about 240 miles (385 kilometers) above the surface. 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.