By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer, June 10, 2015 – An amazing new video lets viewers fly over and around the dwarf planet Ceres, getting a great look at its heavily cratered surface.
The new Ceres video, which NASA released Monday (June 8), was created using 80 images captured by the space agency’s Dawn spacecraft. Some photos were taken from Dawn’s first mapping orbit of the dwarf planet, which lay at an altitude of about 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers), while others are navigational shots snapped from 3,200 miles (5,100 km) away, NASA officials said.
“We used a three-dimensional terrain model that we had produced based on the images acquired so far,” Dawn team member Ralf Jaumann, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, said in a statement. “They will become increasingly detailed as the mission progresses, with each additional orbit bringing us closer to the surface.”
