page_title: Occator (crater)
hierarchical_section_title: Occator (crater)
caption_attribution_description: English: Occator crater, measuring 57 miles (92 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) deep, contains the brightest area on Ceres. This region has been the subject of intense interest since Dawn's approach to the dwarf planet in early 2015. Dawn's close-up view reveals a dome in a smooth-walled pit in the bright center of the crater. Numerous linear features and fractures crisscross the top and flanks of this dome. Prominent fractures also surround the dome and run through smaller, bright regions found within the crater. A separate figure shows the bright spots in a mosaic of two Dawn images taken using a shorter exposure time. The shorter exposure reveals details within the bright features that are overexposed, or nearly so, in the full mosaic. The images used to make these mosaics were taken from Dawn's low-altitude mapping orbit (LAMO), 240 miles (385 kilometers) above Ceres. Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgments, see http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission. For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov. The original NASA image has been cropped and converted from TIFF to JPEG format by the uploader.
context_page_description: Occator is an impact crater located on Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that contains "Spot 5", the brightest of the bright spots observed by the Dawn spacecraft. It was known as "Region A" in ground-based images taken by the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.
  The crater was named after Occator, the Roman god of the harrow and a helper to Ceres. The name Occator was officially approved by the IAU on 3 July 2015.
  On 9 December 2015, scientists reported that the bright spots on Ceres, including those in Occator, may be related to a type of salt, particularly a form of brine containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite; the spots were also found to be associated with ammonia-rich clays. More recently, on 29 June 2016, scientists reported the bright spot to be mostly sodium carbonate, implying that hydrothermal activity was probably involved in creating the bright spots. In August 2020, NASA confirmed that Ceres was a water-rich body with a deep reservoir of brine that percolated to the surface in various locations causing the "bright spots", including those in Occator crater.
context_section_description: Occator /ɒˈkeɪtər/ is an impact crater located on Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, that contains "Spot 5", the brightest of the bright spots observed by the Dawn spacecraft. It was known as "Region A" in ground-based images taken by the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.
  The crater was named after Occator, the Roman god of the harrow and a helper to Ceres. The name Occator was officially approved by the IAU on 3 July 2015.
  On 9 December 2015, scientists reported that the bright spots on Ceres, including those in Occator, may be related to a type of salt, particularly a form of brine containing magnesium sulfate hexahydrite (MgSO₄·6H₂O); the spots were also found to be associated with ammonia-rich clays. More recently, on 29 June 2016, scientists reported the bright spot to be mostly sodium carbonate (Na
  ₂CO
  ₃), implying that hydrothermal activity was probably involved in creating the bright spots. In August 2020, NASA confirmed that Ceres was a water-rich body with a deep reservoir of brine that percolated to the surface in various locations causing the "bright spots", including those in Occator crater.
  A small dome in the center of the crater is 3 km across and about 340 meters height. It is named Cerealia Tholus and is covered by bright salt deposits named Cerealia Facula. The group of thinner salt deposits to the east are named Vinalia Faculae [sic]. In July 2018, NASA released a comparison of physical features, including Occator, found on Ceres with similar ones present on Earth.
caption: Occator imaged by Dawn from LAMO. Fractures are associated with the bright spots and some other areas.
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