Ceres (Dwarf Planet)

Ceres discovered on January 1, 1801, by Giuseppe Piazzi an Italian astronomer and named after the Roman goddess of the harvest, growing plants and motherly love and until recently an asteroid, [1] was on August 24, 2006, officially declared by the IAU to be a "dwarf planet." [2] [3]

The diminutive orb is located in the asteroid belt at a distance of 419,000,000 kilometers (2.8 AU) from the Sun and with a diameter of 950 kilometers is the smallest object in the new category, roughly a quarter the size of Earth's moon.

Studies would seem to indicate that Ceres has a rocky core covered by an icy mantle which could contain in frozen form more water than all of Earth's oceans. Even so, with little or no atmosphere and a maximum surface temperature of -35 degrees Celsius the dwarf planet offers little hope for indigenous life. It does, however, due to the ready availability of ice from which fuel, oxygen and water can be easily derived offer in the form of enclosed habitats definite possibilities for human colonization.

[1] Ceres, at first thought to be a comet has been reclassified more than once. Listed as a planet in order to conform to Bode's law, a now failed hypothesis, it was reclassified as an asteroid in the 1850s.

[2] A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round shape), (c) has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit and (d) is not a satellite.

[3] The Dawn mission, a space probe launched by NASA in 2007, is on the way to Ceres. The mission has been orbiting Vesta (the belts second most massive object and the brightest asteroid visible from Earth) since July 15, 2011. After a year of exploration it will continue on to Ceres arriving in 2015 the first mission to study a dwarf planet up close and personal.

It is possible that Vesta may be reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) at some future time if it's convincingly determined that its nearly round shape is a product of its mass/self gravity overcoming rigid body forces (the southern hemisphere's enormous impact craters "Rheasilvia" and "Older Basin" notwithstanding).

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