Extended Data Table 2 Various best-fitting ellipsoid estimates of the shape of Ceres with respect to the centre of mass

From: A partially differentiated interior for (1) Ceres deduced from its gravity field and shape

  1. Here, ae, be and ce represent the three principal semi-axes, θe, ϕe and ψe represent the orientation angles of the three principal axes, and cx, cy and cz represent the three-dimensional Cartesian centre of the ellipsoid. Note that the orientation angles and the Cartesian centre of the ellipsoid are defined with respect to the Ceres body-fixed frame as defined by the gravity field. The first case shows the result by fitting all nine parameters, which is the best-fitting method for geophysical interpretation. The second case represents the mean reference ellipsoid, which was used for Mollweide projections (Fig. 1a and b). The RMSe column shows the root-mean-square error of each fit, which shows that there is an improvement of about 100 m in estimating the orientation or the centre of the ellipsoid.