Diameter: 975 km
SMA: 2.7654 AU
Period: 4.6018 years
Eccentricity: 0.079138
Rotation: 0.3781 days
Inclination: 10.6°
Axial tilt: 3°

Mass: 9.393x10²⁴kg
Density: 2077 kg/m³
Gravitation: 0.27 m/s²
Escape velocity: 0.51 m/s
Orbit velocity: 17.88 km/s (mean)

Moons: 0

rock and ice

Dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. It was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801. And when Dawn arrived in 2015, Ceres became the first dwarf planet to receive a visit from a spacecraft.

Called an asteroid for many years, Ceres is so much bigger and so different from its rocky neighbors that scientists classified it as a dwarf planet in 2006. Even though Ceres comprises 25 percent of the asteroid belt's total mass, tiny Pluto is still 14 times more massive.

With a radius of 296 miles (476 km), Ceres is 1/13 the radius of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, Ceres would be about as big as a poppy seed. From an average distance of 257 million miles (413 million km), Ceres is 2.8 astronomical units away from the sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 22 minutes to travel from the sun to Ceres.