This week NASA’s Dawn space probe swooped within 22 miles of the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that’s the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA’s JPL reports:
In more than three years of orbiting Ceres, Dawn’s lowest altitude before this month was 240 miles (385 kilometers), so the data from this current orbit bring the dwarf planet into much sharper focus… “[T]he results are better than we had ever hoped,” said Dawn’s chief engineer and project manager, Marc Rayman, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Dawn is like a master artist, adding rich details to the otherworldly beauty in its intimate portrait of Ceres.”
EarthSky reports NASA captured an up-close glimpse of those tantalizing bright spots on Ceres:
The spots, evaporate deposits composed of sodium carbonate, are thought to be left over from when water came up to the surface from deeper below and then evaporated in the extremely tenuous and sporadic water vapor “atmosphere.” That water could be either from a shallow sub-surface reservoir or from a deeper reservoir of salty brines percolating upward through fractures. The deposits in Occator Crater are the largest and brightest of these deposits. As with many discoveries in planetary science, they were completely unexpected, and show that Ceres is not just an inert ball of rock and ice.
Slashdot reader thegameiam adds:
Ceres may have more fresh water than exists on Earth. Perhaps this would make colonization of the asteroid belt more of a possibility?
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Source:: Slashdot