This view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows different types of terrain located side by side on Ceres: a smooth terrain at right with numerous small impact craters, and a less-cratered, hummocky terrain at left. A huge crater chain crosses the scene diagonally from upper left to lower right. The smooth terrain, which is in the western part of Yalode impact basin, is interrupted by a set of roughly parallel furrows and ridges at upper right. These linear features are perpendicular to another set of smaller, fainter linear markings, which appear just below them. An impact into the hummocky terrain formed a crater, seen at left, 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter with a central peak. A great deal of material has slumped down the walls of the crater -- a phenomenon called mass wasting. The crater's impact ejecta forms a smooth blanket around its rim, which takes on a streaky texture leading away from the crater toward lower right.
The image was taken during in Dawn's High Altitude Mapping Orbit (HAMO) phase from an altitude of 911 miles (1,466 kilometers) on Oct. 6, 2015. Image resolution is 394 feet (120 meters) per pixel. The image is centered at 37 degrees south latitude, 279 degrees east longitude.
The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.
More information about Dawn is online at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA