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Ceres on April 17, 2017

Ceres on April 17, 2017
Ceres on April 17, 2017 Dawn took this photo of Ceres on April 17 from an altitude of 27,800 miles (44,800 kilometers). Like the one above, this was taken to help navigate the spacecraft to opposition. Based on the navigation pictures and other data, the operations team developed a pair of trajectory correction maneuvers to fine tune the orbit. (This maneuvering was depicted in the figures in February as the fourth and final thrusting segment. The spacecraft executed the first with five hours of ion thrusting on April 22. It was scheduled to perform the second with a little less than 4.5 hours on April 23-24, but, as the last update to this Dawn Journal before it was posted, that did not occur. See the postscript at the end of this post.) This scene is centered at 52°S, 110°E, and the landscape in sunlight is to the east on this map. In the upper right is Kerwan, the largest Cerean crater at 174 miles (280 kilometers) in diameter. (We saw a close-up of part of this crater in October.) Kerwan is noticeably polygonal because the crater walls formed along preexisting underground fractures when the impactor struck. The largest crater in the grouping just below and right of center is Chaminuka Crater, which is 76 miles (122 kilometers) across. (Chaminuka was a spirit and prophet among the Shona people in what is now Zimbabwe. He could cause a barren tree to bear food and rain to come during a drought. Chaminuka also could turn into a child, a woman, an old man or even a ball. Despite these talents, there’s no evidence the prophet foretold anything about the geology of Ceres nor ever turned into a crater.) Full image and caption. NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA