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PIA21080: Flight Over Occator (Animation)
This frame from a video captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows a flyover of the intriguing crater named Occator on dwarf planet Ceres. Occator is home to Ceres' brightest area.
 Target Name:  Ceres
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Dawn 
 Spacecraft:  Dawn
 Instrument:  Framing Camera 
 Product Size:  516 x 253 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  DLR (German Aerospace Center) 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA21080.tif (101.6 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA21080.jpg (15.49 kB)  

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This video, produced by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), shows the intriguing Occator Crater on Ceres. Occator is home to Ceres' brightest area. It may have been produced by upwelling of salt-rich liquids after the impact that formed the crater.

The animated flyover includes topographic and enhanced-color views of the crater, highlighting the central dome feature. The central area has been named Cerealia Facula. Occator's secondary group of bright spots is called Vinalia Faculae.

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 mission participants, 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

Image Addition Date:
2016-12-15