Tag: Ceres

Data collected by Dawn since it entered orbit around Ceres on March 6 now strongly suggests that the bright spots on the surface are produced by venting water,

Andreas Nathues, principal investigator for Dawn’s framing camera, says the feature has spectral characteristics that are consistent with ice. Intriguingly, the brightness can be seen even when the spacecraft is looking on edge at the crater rim, suggesting that the feature may be outgassing water vapor above the rim and into space. “Ceres seems to be indeed active,” he says. The feature brightens through the course of the day, and then shuts down at night. Nathues says the behavior is similar to that of comets.

More here. By mid-April Dawn should finally settle this with high resolution images.

Get ready for cool images! Dawn was successfully captured by the gravitational field of Ceres early this morning, and is now in orbit around the planet/asteroid.

Because of the orbital mechanics of its arrival, however, Dawn will observing Ceres’s night side until mid-April, which means we will not see many new images until then.

Cool images! Dawn’s newest images have revealed that the brightest spot on Ceres, shown on the right in a cropped version of the full image, has a dimmer companion.

“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The spots are still too small for Dawn’s camera to resolve. That they are inside what looks like a crater is very puzzling. If they are water-ice, why are they so bright and distinct? One one think the ice would pile up along the crater wall, but then, that’s what we think based on our experience here on Earth with wind, rain, and our heavy gravity. Ceres is cold, has no atmosphere, and a tiny gravitational field. Every geological process will proceed in a different manner.

On Sunday Dawn took the best images ever of Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system.

The images are still somewhat fuzzy, as the spacecraft is still more than 140,000 miles away.

Getting closer! Scientists for the space probe Dawn have released new images of Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.

Some of the images have been combined to produce a very short movie showing the asteroid’s rotation. The images also show that unlike Vesta, Dawn’s previous target, Ceres appears very spherical, like a planet.