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Dawn Spacecraft Gets a Better Look At Ceres' Bizarre 'White Spots'
StartsWithABang writes: Since its discovery as the first asteroid more than 200 years ago, Ceres has been one of the most poorly understood objects in the Solar System as even imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope is unable to resolve very much. But NASA's Dawn mission, since moving on from Vesta, has begun to map Ceres, constructing the highest resolution global map ever, with better data to come. The greatest mystery so far are two bright white spots at the bottom of a deep crater, brighter and more reflective than anything else on the planet's surface. Right now, three leading possibilities for the origin of these features exist, with Dawn possessing the capabilities to teach us which one (if any) is correct, hopefully by the end of the year!
I suppose that counts as option 3...
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I favor number 4: domed alien cities.
Seriously, though: Ceres is probably a better destination for settlement than Mars.
They all seem to appear right where you would expect stress fractures to be on a body shaped like this.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
more reflective than anything else on the planet's surface.
Pluto is not, but Ceres is? Has the definition changed again?
Nothing natural can do that on that scale. Wonder what it's trying to tell us?
I'm not an expert, but if it were ice, wouldn't you expect to see it in a crater on the pole where it is permanently in the shadow, rather than on the equator ?
For the love of all science fiction be aliens!!! How many Sci-fi stories have we all read where an asteroid/comet/artefact is floating around our Solar system and it turns out to be some uber cool alien thing that has warp drive or a stargate or whatever and off we go adventuring around the galaxy?
In fact I could even narrow the question down to how many sci-fi stories have we all read where the artefact involved Ceres?
So while if I had to bet I would go with ice, soil disturbance, tectonic, or maybe even something a little cool like magnetic. But I want aliens!
The solar irradiance at Ceres is about 150 W/m2...1/9th that of earth. It is cold out there in the asteroid belt in comparison to the moon or Mercury where surface ice is exposed only in polar permanent shadow. As reference the moons of Jupiter have no trouble maintaining a coat of ice.
My guess is that the surface of Ceres is like a charred marshmallow; organic long chain hydrocarbon on top forming a dark crust that protects a frozen interior of H20/CO2/Methane and ammonia. The white spot is a rupture out of which has gurgled up some salty water that is sublimating to space.
The question is can we skate on it?
It has been theorized before that the asteroid belt could have been formed when a larger planet was destroyed in a collision. It has also been theorized that the center of Jupiter is a giant diamond. What if Ceres is the leftover diamond from the center of a large gas giant that got destroyed? Having a diamond the size of Texas would certainly create a new space race and would help to change some of the existing laws on space exploration and ownership.
There is always a soft spot under one of the black round circles on a coconut.. its where the straw goes! Perhaps this is where we are supposed tap into the interstellar fuel source!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Large, shiny reflective surfaces... it's a pair of Monoliths.
mark "would like to go there to investigate them...."
No need to click - the "three leading possibilities" are exactly what you guessed:
- Ice
- Dry Ice
- Different rocks that have a different albedo
If you only guessed "ice" and "different rocks" you still get full credit.
It's water ice. Possibly ammonia hydrate. It is also not very surprising that it occurs on the floor of the crater. Many craters on terrestrial and icy worlds have structures (peaks, depressions, melt deposits) on their floors. The puzzle here is that the large crater appears to be old. Melt at its center should have been obscured by ejecta of subsequent smaller impacts. Perhaps Ceres low gravity and isolation prevents this.
I've often wondered if we are the first species to achieve intelligence on Earth.
Bonobos are pretty smart, and a rough estimate might put them about 5 million years behind us on the evolutionary scale.
Taking that as a rough guide (no more rough than the Drake equation), suppose humans decided to leave the planet, and suppose Bonobos evolved to our level of technology. Would they find evidence of us?
Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would get covered in quite a bit of muck, any underground bunker would collapse. Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.
Then reverse that and suppose that some *other* species evolved into intelligence more than 5 million years ago and left. Would we see any evidence?
The results of non-natural nuclear reactors might indicate something was happening, but note that we haven't examined all the radioactive ore deposits on the planet yet - maybe we haven't found their "Yucca Mountain" installation yet. (Or then again, maybe we did.)
If we wanted to leave a message for the next round of intelligent life, the best bet would be somewhere in space. The Lagrange points perhaps, or maybe the moon. Or maybe on a large asteroid - something that's big enough to be seen by early astronomers, and small enough to land and take off from without much difficulty.
Note in the image of Ceres from the link there's a crater that comes up before the white spot that's distinctly hexagonal in nature. In fact, it 'kinda looks like a regular hexagon. It's visible at the 10:00 position starting in the 3rd frame, and sweeps by before the bright spots come into view.
Just sayin'.
Who the hell modded up this off-topic spam post?
Either some lazy alien left the lights on, or...
giant radioactive space seagulls...
Does it shine on the dark side?
If this is water ice, we need to send a rover to Ceres. This may end up being a better place to land astronauts than Mars.
Enough Helium 3 to make me very very very rich... and yeah power the entire earth for a million years.
Spaceballs spitballs.
Barf and Lonestar where messing around doing some target practice with the Spitball cannon... Don't worry, Mega-Maid will clean it up eventually.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Don't they have something similar to a spectrograph to determine chemical signature of selected targets? I thought such was standard equipment on such probes. Perhaps they are not yet close enough to Ceres to get useful data from it.
spectrograph overview: http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/p...
Table-ized A.I.
Ceres wasn't discovered as the first asteroid, for decades it was a planet. A retrospective recategorisation took place when discoveries of smaller bodies revealed the existence of the asteroid belt. The planet Ceres became a victim by association.
I'm a member of the first wave of haters about planetary reclassification. Unlike the emotional and sometimes histrionic Second Wave, a.k.a Pluto Planet People, we Ceres Reinstaters like to put our case without exclamation marks but trust me, we feel just as deeply about Ceres as the PPP feel about Pluto.
The bright spots are a watermark to help catch outsiders taking pictures without a license.
All ur base...
In the Animated GIF, There are Black Oval Spots that appear in some frames. they are not part of the landscape. More like objects in low orbit. they dont look like digital artifacts. check it out.