Dwarf Planet Ceres Revealed by NASA in Video

Images of the dwarf planet Ceres by NASA show certain unique features of the dark and covert body in space.

A novel video clip based upon images taken by NASA of the small planet Ceres came on the scene recently. The surface is pockmarked. 

The video clip was taken from Dawn’s mapping orbit. The more than 80 shots were collated into the form of a video clip. The 3D images provided a wonderful diorama of the planet. 

“We used a three-dimensional terrain model that we had produced based on the images acquired so far,” said Dawn team member Ralf Jaumann of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Berlin. “They will become increasingly detailed as the mission progresses — with each additional orbit bringing us closer to the surface.”

As the mission gets closer to the planet we will be receiving even more images that show the close-up details of the diminutive planet. 

Early on in 2015, Dawn became the first mission spacecraft to come within close range of a small planet such as Ceres. Onlookers can get a bird’s eye view of the planet via the new video clip that just got made.

It is indeed a momentary time in the history of the race for space. The model employed in the creation of the video clip was very complex and state-of-the-art. 

Vesta and Ceres are the largest of the smallest planets in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres is bigger than Vesta though. In fact, it is almost double the size of Vesta. 

Basically, Ceres and Vesta are splinter mini-planets left over from the time when the solar system was being formed. 

The probe that has taken high quality photographs of the planets will provide new clues into how the two planets were formed in the first place. 

The conditions during that far off time in the past when the sun sent off pieces of itself hurling through the solitary space and they cooled off into planets will be better understood when the video clip is studied in detail by researchers and scientists.