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Close-Up Images Show Ceres' Bright Spots In Great Detail
New submitter Actual_Alien writes: Since the Dawn probe arrived at Ceres, everybody has been wondering about the mysterious bright spots on an otherwise dark dwarf planet. New images sent back recently show the spots in better detail than ever — 140 meters per pixel. NASA used composite imagery to get high-quality exposures of both the bright areas and the surrounding dark areas. We can now clearly see a wide, flat crater with a rim that's almost vertical in spots. The brightest area is right at the center, with other markings to the upper right in the image. Dawn's orbit around Ceres also allows scientists to look at the crater from other perspectives, and they've generated a pair of animations to illustrate better what it looks like. One of them highlights the bright spots, while the other shows color-coded topography.
Whoa... just noticed that the grabens seem to be younger than the (presumed) salts, even going straight across one of the super-bright areas. Seems to make it hard to envision that both were simultaneously caused by impacts (my default presumption). Seems to me that if this was caused by an impact, the active tectonic forces persisted for long after the impact (say, due to resultant localized internal heating), long enough for the salt flats to fully develop, lose their volatiles, and fully relax; or otherwise, that the forces that made them are unrelated to impacts altogether.
Oh, I can't wait to hear what the experts come up with! :)
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Dawn is actually an averted disaster due to its failed reaction wheels. The mission team came up with a really clever plan to achieve all of the same science goals using even less fuel than had been planned by using the ion engine more, not rotating as much in Ceres orbit, etc. It's slower, but they saved the mission.
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