Dawn Sends Sharper Scenes from Ceres | Hacker News Reader

Dawn Sends Sharper Scenes from Ceres

nasa.gov

61 pointstaylorwc12 comments

NASA's video shows the mountain nicely in 3D at the 1:06 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inc9BtRip04

Wow, that is a stunning picture. It looks like a bullet hole in a windshield (top pic). What I don't get is if that is water ice why it isn't sublimating off at a huge rate.

I would love to be, in a space craft, right there and be able to say, "Oh hey, that looks really interesting, lets go down and check it out. Sulu, you've got the helm."

They're not sure it's ice yet, and it seems like it's more likely to be something else:

  the Dawn science team has not found evidence that is
  consistent with ice. The spots' albedo - a measure of
  the amount of light reflected - is also lower than 
  predictions for concentrations of ice at the surface.

caveat: this is from a separate article, but I think they are referring to the bright spots in general: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4677

Distance from the sun is a huge issue with regards to whether you can have water laying around. From Jupiter's orbit out you often have tons of water on the surfaces of moons with no atmospheres. Where Ceres is it looks like water sublimes but not too quickly, so that patches of ice exposed by collisions last long enough for us to see them.

That 1st picture - light from the right yet the '6km mountain' is shiny on the left. Perhaps its a 6km hole instead? Confused.

No, the light is coming from the left. You can tell because all of the other craters in the image are illuminated on the right-hand side.

So the mountain is immediately next to a similarly sized crater. Seems like that would be related though I can't imagine how it would have been formed.

Someone must have dug a hole and piled the dirt up.

Space Dwarves.

Seriously though, the sides of that peak are pretty clean, so unless there's some atmospheric scrubbing action going on, it'd have to be pretty recent. I'm curious about how it could be formed - I would think that volcanic activity in a low-gravity environment would be ... messier.

Don't wish to detract too much from NASA imagery, but their website is totally broken on stock Android browser.

Any news on the mysterious bright spots?

Yes, this is covered in OP's link if you scroll down. Here is a link directly to the relevant section:

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/dawn/pia19617/occator-crater-enhanc...

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