How far away is Ceres right now?

330,491,461

kilometres · Ceres's distance from Earth

About 2.2 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
An airliner at cruising speed would take 42 years to cover it.

Right now Ceres is in the morning sky, before dawn. You need binoculars to see it.

Right now Ceres is about 330 million kilometres from Earth, and the gap changes every second. A radio message, moving at the speed of light, needs 18 minutes to cross it.

Ceres circles the Sun in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Its distance from us swings between 237 million and 593 million kilometres. It is the largest body in the belt, and a dwarf planet. The next close approach is on 9 January 2027.

Time until Ceres's next close approach to Earth

70 d 10 h 32 m 51 s

Measured

Length of one turn of Ceres (sidereal day)

9 h 04 m 27 s

Measured

Length of a year on Ceres

4.60 years

Measured

Average temperature at Ceres's equator over a year

-113 °C

Estimated

What is Ceres?

The largest body in the asteroid belt

Between Mars and Jupiter lies the asteroid belt, a wide ring of rocky bodies left over from when the planets formed. Ceres is the giant among them, and the only one counted as a dwarf planet.

Even so, it is small. Earth is about 13 times as wide, and about 2,300 worlds the size of Ceres would fit inside it. Our Moon is about 3.6 times as wide. Pluto is about 14 times as heavy.

Ceres is a world of rock, ice and salt. NASA says water could make up as much as a quarter of it, mostly as ice under a dusty, salty crust. It has no moons and no rings.

It circles the Sun at about 2.8 times Earth's distance. It is the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system.

964 kmEquatorial diameter of Ceres

Three names in two centuries

A planet, an asteroid, a dwarf planet

Giuseppe Piazzi found Ceres on 1 January 1801 and called it a planet. Then more small worlds turned up in the same region. In time they were all called asteroids, and by the 1860s Ceres was counted as one of them.

In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union set out what a planet is. It goes round the Sun. Its own gravity has pulled it into a nearly round shape. And it has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

Ceres is round, and it circles the Sun. But it shares its lane with the rest of the belt, so it fails the third test. The IAU made it a dwarf planet, together with Pluto. Today NASA lists Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris as the dwarf planets.

Some planetary scientists disagree with the IAU. They argue that any round world smaller than a star is a planet, wherever it orbits. By that measure Ceres is a planet again.

2.7656 AUCeres's average distance from the Sun

The next close approach

Why the distance keeps changing

Earth and Ceres both circle the Sun, like runners on a track. Earth has the inside lane and runs faster. Ceres needs about 4.6 Earth years for one lap.

So Earth catches up with Ceres once every about 1.3 years. Each time, Earth passes between the Sun and Ceres, and the two come closest. Then Earth pulls ahead and swings round to the far side of the Sun, and the gap widens. A message then takes longer to cross.

Ceres's path is a slightly oval one, tilted against Earth's. So some meetings are much closer than others. The best come when Ceres is near the part of its orbit closest to the Sun.

The clock on this page counts down to the next close approach, on 9 January 2027.

70 d 10 h 32 m 51 sTime until Ceres's next close approach to Earth

Right now

A hello that takes minutes

Radio waves are a kind of light, and nothing travels faster. Even so, a message to Ceres takes 18 minutes to arrive today. NASA's Dawn spacecraft lived with that wait for years.

Dawn launched in September 2007. Its ion engines pushed it gently but for years on end. It circled the asteroid Vesta first, then moved on. In March 2015 it went into orbit around Ceres. It was the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet, four months before New Horizons flew past Pluto.

Dawn studied Ceres until 2018. On 1 November 2018 it fell silent, after running out of the fuel that kept its antenna pointed at Earth. It is still in orbit around Ceres, NASA says, and will stay there for decades.

330,491,460 kmCeres's distance from Earth

Occator crater

The bright spots

As Dawn came closer in early 2015, bright points shone out of the dark surface of Ceres. They lay in a crater now called Occator, 92 kilometres across.

Up close, the brightest patch turned out to be salt. Scientists studying Dawn's spectra found mostly sodium carbonate, a kind of soda. It is the most concentrated carbonate known anywhere beyond Earth, on that scale.

The team thinks it is what was left when salty water, or brine, rose from below and dried out at the surface. NASA says several places on Ceres show signs of recent activity. Salt lowers the freezing point of water, so pockets of brine may have stayed liquid underground long after Ceres should have frozen.

That makes Ceres one of the places in the solar system where scientists would like to search for signs of life.

92 kmWidth of Occator crater on Ceres

Day and year

A quick day, a long year, and the cold

Ceres turns fast. One full turn takes 9 h 04 m 27 s, one of the shortest days in the solar system. A day from one sunrise to the next is only seconds longer. The spin makes it bulge a little at the equator. Its year is long: about 4.6 Earth years. That is roughly 4,400 of its own days.

Its axis is barely tilted, NASA says. So Ceres has hardly any seasons. The Sun stays over its equator all year.

It is cold there. Averaged over a year, the ground at the equator is about -113 °C, against 15 °C on Earth. That is a model's estimate, and the daytime ground is warmer. There is almost no air to hold the heat, only a very thin trace of water vapour.

Near the poles, some craters never see the Sun at all. In those cold traps, water ice may last for a very long time.