So far, NASA’s Dawn objective had made known a great many appealing landforms on Ceres’ outside from pyramid-shaped hills in to mysterious neutral tone bubbles within a of their craters.
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NASA’s Dawn will be in action again from mid-August and this time observations will be taken from an altitude of 900 miles (three times closer to the orbit).
A new animation of Ceres makes you feel like you’re actually flying over the craggy surface of the dwarf planet.
Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Mission scientists hope to determine what forces shaped the mountain and what causes the bright streaks.
According to Dr Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, a scientist for the Dawn mission: “the craters we find on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about the same size and density as Ceres”. “It’s unusual that it’s not associated with a crater”.
In examining the way Occator’s bright spots reflect light at different wavelengths, the Dawn science team has not found evidence that is consistent with ice. The blobs’ amount of reflected light, or the albedo, is also at odds with an ice surface hypothesis. The tall mountain is near the bottom right and bright spots speckle the surface.
“We are now comparing the spots with the reflective properties of salt, but we are still puzzled by their source”, Dawn’s principal investigator Chris Russell said in a press release.
‘We look forward to new, higher-resolution data from the mission’s next orbital phase, ‘
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It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Dawn.
The picture of Ceres, courtesy of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, were composted into a digital presentation.
The mission experienced a slight hiccup when the spacecraft had a problem controlling its orientation on June 30 as it started to move down to a lower orbit using its ion engine, but for now, all seems to be well.
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Scientists have dubbed this brightly streaked, 4-mile-high (6.4 kilometers) mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres “The Pyramid”. The probe orbited Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012, and it arrived in orbit around the 584-mile-wide (940 km) Ceres this past March.
