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Jump8of 100 · 264 M km from Earth

Ceres: a quarter of the asteroid belt

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and holds a quarter of its mass. Its bright spots are salts. Facts with their sources.

Ceres, a round grey world full of craters, with a bright spot in Occator crater, photographed by the Dawn spacecraft
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA · original

Curious facts

  1. The biggest in the belt

    Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, and on its own it holds 25% of the whole belt’s mass. 1

  2. The whole belt weighs less than the Moon

    Add up every asteroid and the total mass is still less than that of our Moon. 2

  3. The bright spots are salts

    The bright spots in Occator crater, photographed by Dawn, are salts: sodium carbonate, not table salt. 3

Ceres in Orbit

In the game, Ceres is jump 8 of the route, 264 M km from Earth. Its logbook card says:

Logbook · Jump 8

The bright spots in Occator crater are salt

I want to try Orbit Already in the group: download

Two steps with the Google account you use on Play: join the group, then download the test. Google Play can take a while, sometimes more than an hour, before it lets you download it; if you see “Item not found”, wait and try again.

What Orbit is like

Sources

  1. NASA, Ceres Facts. science.nasa.gov/dwarf-planets/ceres/facts
  2. NASA, Asteroid Facts. science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/facts
  3. NASA, Ceres. science.nasa.gov/dwarf-planets/ceres

Checked between 8 and 11 October 2026.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA · original