Relative size and alignment of Dawn's six science orbits at Ceres

Relative size and alignment of Dawn's six science orbits at Ceres
Relative size and alignment of Dawn's six science orbits at Ceres This illustrates (and simplifies) the relative size and alignment of Dawn’s six science orbits at Ceres. We are looking down on Ceres’ north pole. The spacecraft follows polar orbits, and seen edge-on here, each orbit looks like a line. (Orbits 1, 2 and 6 extend off the figure to the lower right, on the night side. Like 3, 4 and 5, they are centered on Ceres.) The orbits are numbered chronologically. The first five orbits were circular. Orbit 6, which is XMO3, is elliptical, and the dotted section represents the range from the minimum to the maximum altitude. 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 first four orbits, with each one viewed face-on rather than edge-on.) Click on this image for a larger view. NASA / JPL-Caltech