Grand Tour Ceres

[Shadow-Dragon-777]

On New Years Day 1801 Giuseppe Piazzi pointed his telescope at the sky and found a star that wasn't there before. At first he thought it was a supernova, but the star had actually moved like a planet. Due to its dimness and the discovery of Uranus decades prior, the object, later named Ceres, was declared a planet. It was not long after that several other "planets" were found in orbits similar to Ceres when asteroids were defined. For a while, Ceres was an enigma. It was the only round object in the asteroid belt but had a density more to a dirty snowball than a rock. Did it have an atmosphere? What were the bright spots Hubble kept detecting? Where did it come from? This was to be answered with the Dawn spacecraft launched in 2007. Following a study of Vesta, Dawn approached Ceres in early 2015.

The dark surface of Ceres.

The Dawn spacecraft found a world cratered like Mercury or the Moon. What surprised many however were two discoveries. The largest bright spots were at the bottom of a crater, Occator. And on the opposite side, a large mound. The mound has since been considered to be the youngest of a series of cryovolcanoes, the heat source of which is unknown as Ceres' interior should have cooled billions of years ago. The bright spots have been found to be the result of geysers forming after the crater's formation. Of the craters, most striking was Kerwan, a massive pancake 1/3rd of Ceres' diameter.
This addon contains the following for Ceres
64K surface texture
32K normal map
32K topographic map
Various geology layers

DOWNLOAD GRAND TOUR CERES HERE!!!

Occator crater and its bright spots.

[EarthMoon]

3.69 GB

[Shadow-Dragon-777]

This is now just an addon of Ceres. For Pluto/Charon, see viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23266
If you downloaded the original Grand Tour Dwarf Planets, DELETE it first before adding this. The bumpmap has been replaced with a normal map because bumpmap VT's do not work in Celestia.