Ceres designated 1 Ceres is the largest known asteroid and the only dwarf planet in the inner solar system , and the first asteroid discovered by humanity. It lies in the asteroid belt. Ceres is the site of Ceres station , a space station that was one of the first sites of human colonization. Half a generation after humanity arrived there, Tycho Manufacturing managed to spin up the asteroid, which gave it a gravity of 0. The station has tens of thousands of kilometers of tunnels.
Ceres Station Airlocks
Getting there
In the new SyFy channel series "The Expanse," colonists live on a Ceres that is very different from the dwarf planet seen today — but what if NASA were to send a human mission out to Ceres as it is now, without changing the dwarf planet? The asteroid spins, so the colonists all experience gravity. But if an expedition went out today, the explorers would find a totally untamed environment. What challenges would they face? The orbiting probe has just moved to a lower mapping altitude to get a good look at the surface of Ceres, and already some clear differences are showing up compared with another large, rocky body: Earth's moon.
The Physics of Ceres and the Ceres Space Station
A group of Finnish researchers are proposing a permanent human habitat in the orbit of Ceres, a massive asteroid and dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. In the series, however, the space rock itself was spun up to create a crewed habitat on its surface with artificial gravity. In a paper uploaded to the prewrite repository arXiv this week, the team argues that Ceres would be prime real estate because it has nitrogen, which could enable the creation of an Earth-like atmosphere. They propose a number of smaller spinning satellites, attached to each other via magnetic tethers to create a massive disk-shaped megasatellite.
This planetoid converted to space station is home to some six million residents and has anywhere between to 1, ships docked on any given day. The dwarf planet has an average diameter of kilometers miles with a surface gravity that is less than three-hundredths that of Earth's 0. To make things more livable, the engineers of Tycho Manufacturing have artificially spun the asteroid so that its surface gravity is three-tenths of Earth's 0.
