With a diameter of about 950 km, Ceres is by far the largest and most massive object in the asteroid belt, and has about a third of the belt's total mass. It was once thought to be smaller than Vesta, which is brighter. The asteroid is spherical, unlike the irregular shapes of smaller bodies with lower gravity. At its brightest it is still too dim to be seen with the naked eye.[14] Ceres is located at 2.8 AU (257 million miles) from the Sun, which makes it the closest dwarf planet to the Sun. It is also the only dwarf planet in the Solar System that has no moons.
On September 27, 2007, NASA launched the Dawn space probe to explore Ceres and Vesta. In 2015, Dawn became the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres a few months before NASA's New Horizons spacecraft visited Pluto, another dwarf planet.
Ceres has an unusual crater, Occator which contains bright salts.
Images
Close up image of bright salts, imaged by the Dawn spacecraft, in the crater Occator on Ceres.
↑ 2.02.12.22.32.4Yeomans, Donald K. (July 5, 2007). "1 Ceres". JPL Small-Body Database Browser. Retrieved 2007-07-05.—The listed values were rounded at the magnitude of uncertainty (1-sigma).
↑Piazzi, Giuseppe (1801). Risultati delle osservazioni della nuova Stella scoperta il dì 1 gennajo all'Osservatorio Reale di Palermo (in Italian). Palermo.
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