“We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that,” Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director, said in a release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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Ceres falls into the same unique category of dwarf planets as Pluto. According to the International Astronomical Union, this classification is for a celestial body that “is in orbit around the Sun,” “has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape” and “has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit,” meaning the body is big enough to clear objects like asteroids and debris out of its orbital way.
