NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is currently en route to the asteroid belt where it will rendezvous with the region’s largest celestial body, Ceres. As a sneak preview, the spacecraft has snapped its best-yet image of the dwarf planet.
The image was snapped at a distance of 740,000 miles (1.2 million km) from Ceres. The dwarf planet features an average diameter of about 590 miles (950 km).
At 9-pixels wide, the image isn’t much. It doesn’t hold a candle to the one previously snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope:
But just wait until Dawn arrives at Ceres. In early 2015, the spacecraft will begin delivering images at much higher resolution.
Since launching in 2007, Dawn has visited Vesta, a giant protoplanet currently located 104 million miles (168 million kilometers) away from Ceres.
Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.
