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Dawn's science orbits at Ceres

Dawn's science orbits at Ceres
Dawn's science orbits at Ceres This illustrates (and simplifies) the relative size and alignment of Dawn’s five science orbits at Ceres. We are looking down on Ceres’ north pole. The spacecraft follows polar orbits, and seen edge-on here, each circular orbit looks like a line. (Orbits 1 and 2 extend off the figure to the right, on the night side. Like 3, 4 and 5, they are centered on Ceres.) The orbits are numbered chronologically. With the sun far to the left, the left side of Ceres is in daylight. Each time the spacecraft travels over the illuminated hemisphere in the different orbital planes, the landscape beneath it is lit from a different angle. Ceres rotates counterclockwise from this perspective (just as Earth does when viewed from the north). So higher numbers correspond to orbits that pass over ground closer to sunrise, earlier in the Cerean day. (Compare this diagram with this figure, which shows only the relative sizes of the orbits, with each one viewed face-on rather than edge-on.) Click on this image for a larger view. NASA / JPL-Caltech