# Ceres

*In the Solar System*

The largest thing in the asteroid belt and the only dwarf planet inside Neptune's orbit - 940 km across, a quarter of the belt's whole mass, and round enough to be a small world rather than a rock. Dawn orbited it from 2015 and found the bright patches in Occator crater are salt left behind by brine that reached the surface from somewhere below, which makes Ceres one of the places in the Solar System that may still have liquid water in it.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Radius | 470 km |
| Around the equator | 2,951 km |
| Mass | 9.38 x 10^20 kg |
| Compared with the Earth | 0 × |
| Turns once in | 9 h 4 m |
| From the Sun | 402,898,701 km (-119,582 km/d) |
| From the Earth | 443,263,902 km (-1,915,155 km/d) |
| A signal takes | 25 min |

Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of 2026-09-05, changing at the rate given beside each. The interpolation itself is good to a few kilometres; what ages these figures is the date, not the arithmetic.

## Elsewhere

- On the live map: https://www.orbitalmap.space/?world=solar-system&focus=ceres
- This object as a page: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/ceres/
- Every object: https://www.orbitalmap.space/o/
- What this site is and what it reads: https://www.orbitalmap.space/llms.txt