File:PIA20191-Ceres-DwarfPlanet-Dawn-4thMapOrbit-LAMO-image1-20151219.jpg

English: PIA20191: Messor Crater from LAMO - Image 1

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA20191

This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows part of Messor Crater (25 miles or 40 kilometers, wide), located at northern mid-latitudes on Ceres. The scene shows an older crater in which a large lobe-shaped flow partly covers the northern (top) part of the crater floor. The flow is a mass of material ejected when a younger crater formed just north of the rim.

Dawn took this image on Dec. 19 from its low-altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) from an approximate altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers) above Ceres. The image resolution is 120 feet (35 meters) per pixel.

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 acknowledgments, see http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.