Ceres' Deepening Mysteries

except your message would be pulverized by impacts over the millions of years it lies in wait.

A better candidate would be Luna, or some other body that has a cleared orbit.

So a 'complex crater' involves a certain degree of subsidence of the uplifted outer rim, and the forces involved in this subsidence, spreading the underlying rock, combine at the center to push material upwards into a small solitary peak. I always assumed this happened due to a continuous pressure of magma or something in volcanoes, but it turns out the effect happens regardless of and in addition to any underlying geothermal activity: it's a feature of gravity and long-term settling of annular structures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_crater#mediaviewer/File...

It looks like this is a crater which has ice(water ice? CO2 ice?) underlying a thick, mobile dust layer. When Ceres suffered an impact at some point in the past, it excavated a crater in the ice and dust, then the dust settled back down, covering everything. Over the following millennia / eons, the crater rim subsided and the center entered a long period of slow uplift, pushing through the dust layer and exposing the ice.

It's possible something more novel could be at work here involving phase changes and maybe cyclical patterns; Unpredicted seasonal geysers have been observed on Mars, as an example. A complex crater filled with dust over underlying ice, though, is probably the default assumption.

Abandoned, but fully operational, alien base. We send humans there, land successfully, discover we are not alone in the Universe, and Humanity is united behind the effort to gain deeper understanding of ourselves. Also, there's a hidden door somewhere in the base that leads deeper into the interior of Ceres, where we discover .. the whole thing was a station.

A man can dream.

The not-crazy theory is that this is a chunk of ice uncovered by the impact that created the crater they are in and that they reflect the sun.

If so it would be some sort of ice volcano. I didn't find where it said what the spectrum was for the camera, infra-red? visible? something else? One theory for it is that it is a dust covered ice ball, a large enough impact could uncover the ice (although I would expect there to me a sublimation cloud at that point.)

If the core is nickle iron it could be a chunk that melted and reformed after impact.

Or it could be a bad pixel :-) but that seems unlikely as it moves with Ceres and not with Dawn.

A recursive portal into the far, far distant future; billions of years in fact. Once entered, there would be no way back for physical bodies, however, radio transmissions could find a way.

My crazy theory: naturally formed nuclear reactor.

I'm curious too, so I was glad to read that the probe will get about 10x closer, and of course being there permanently means there should be some benefit from cumulative observations until such time as the power/equipement runs down.

Edit: it's entertaining to think about what results would create a scramble for a follow-up mission to exploit it.

As mentioned in some of the comments to the posted article, I want to know if getting some spectroscopy on those white spots couldn't be possible. Perhaps summed over a quite long series? (Wouldn't it be a thrill if they were metallic?)

Ceres could be the Death Star. Or the main component of Hactar.

Could they be ice or metallic material?

Everybody would be disappointed if they were not the eyes of an exogorth staring at the probe and waiting for a lunch after so many years.

It's approaching very slowly, at bicycle speed.

From the article, Ceres diameter:

Mar 1 : 207 pixels

Apr 10 : 306 pixels

Apr 14 : 453 pixels