Part of the southern hemisphere on dwarf planet Ceres is seen in this image taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Hamori crater, named after a Japanese god and protector of tree leaves, is the large crater near the center of the image. Hamori is 37 miles (60 kilometers) in diameter. The edge of Darzamat crater is visible in the upper left.
Dawn took this image on Oct. 18, 2015, from an altitude of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers). It has a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel.
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