Dwarf planet Ceres – nine pixels across
Dwarf planet Ceres – nine pixels across
On 1 December 2014, the Framing Camera system on board the Dawn spacecraft acquired an image of the dwarf planet Ceres from a distance of 1.2 million kilometres. At this distance, the celestial body, which is nearly 1000 kilometres across, is only nine pixels wide. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is participating in the mission and will use the data acquired by the camera to create a three-dimensional terrain model of Ceres. In this image, Ceres is the bright spot in the centre. To compensate for the distortion caused to the long exposure time, the resulting incorrect size of the dwarf planet has been corrected in the image.
