dwarf planet Archives - Argyll Free Press

While a large portion of the focus of NASA is currently going towards the ‘Journey to Mars’ mission and its prerequisites, the space objects beyond the Red Planet remain an intriguing study topic as well. One such fascinating subject of discussion for scientists is the dwarf planet Ceres that lies just between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is considered the largest object in the asteroid belt.

At only 945 kilometers in diameter, Ceres could appear a very dull dwarf planet, displaying nothing more than a battered gray surface, with dozens of craters left by impacts with various meteorites. But on a closer inspection of some of the craters left by such impacts, one can notice that the small planet displays some bright spots inside these craters that were not that visible until the Dawn probe managed to capture a few ‘close-ups’ of the planet’s surface.

Ceres is believed to have a rocky core and icy mantle, as well as what is suspected to be an internal ocean of liquid water. Previous to the Dawn probe’s arrival close enough to the dwarf planet in order to study it, it fell down onto the Hubble Space Telescope to study its surface. But given the long distance and the very small size of Ceres, not much was achieved other than detecting a variation on the surface. Surprisingly, this variation was detected right where the Dawn probe later spotted the bright spots.

It was eventually concluded, thanks to the images that the Dawn probe was able to capture, that the spots are most likely made of hydrated magnesium sulfates. In earthlier terms, these are very similar to bath salts. Prolonged study of these bright spots revealed that the icy materials in and around the shiny, bright spots may be turning straight into vapor when they are hit and heated by sunlight.

This is a discovery that was made by comparing the different reflectivity levels displayed. Vapor will reflect sunlight differently than solid ice does. The two bright spots located in the 80-kilometer-wide crater called Occator were revealed to be a conglomerate of what appears to be as many as ten different spots. Scientists believe that these spots freeze at night and evaporate within direct sunlight, but certain differences and a lack of perfect cyclicity of this process does anything but confirm this hypothesis.

Researchers are currently devising a method of continuing their study on these bright spots of Ceres through means that can be employed from the surface of the Earth.

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Just earlier last week, a new animation was released, depicting the way NASA imagines a flight over Ceres in a computer rendered video. This does not mean that the stunning images you can see in the video are any less than realistic.

In the absence of real life footage – at least in the way the public expects it – NASA has always been known to find the most exquisite ways of showing the workings on the universe. While close shots of the surface of our own planet depict the way the city lights and planetary magnetic field graze the Earth and look like form outer space, more distant celestial bodies in our solar system aren’t as easy to immortalize.

While satellites and probes can only show us so much information about the way things look from the big black void out there, the result is rarely clear enough to serve as an entire mapping of the studied object.

And out of all the places that are within reach of mankind in our own solar system, the Asteroid Belt is most likely one of the most unsafe ones – especially for unmanned spacecrafts. The NASA mission that lasted from August to October 2015 and employed the numerous cameras and sensors mounted on the Dawn spacecraft. Throughout the 3 months, Dawn’s framing camera team situated on Earth, at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), worked to create an accurate 3D mapping of the surface of Ceres.

Ceres is a dwarf planet and yet considered the largest body that can be found in the asteroid belt that rests between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Made of rock and ice, the planet is believed to have remnants of liquid water in an entire internal ocean, deep underneath the outer layer of ice. Because of the presence of ammonia in its outer composition, it is believed that Ceres originated from much further away – the Kuiper belt that rests on the outer edge of our solar system.

The video released by NASA depicts the many craters that the surface of Ceres keeps as a reminder of the rough conditions of our solar system’s asteroid belt. The movie depicts the planet in color – something that real footage is not common to have – in order to highlight the different materials that can be found in the surface. This is a mere example of the mystery surrounding the dwarf planet as scientists are amazingly intrigued by the potential of Ceres of being one of the place where life may have – at one point – existed in microbial form.

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Secrets of the Shifting Bright Spots of Ceres

NASA Imagines a Flight Over Ceres in a Computer Rendered Video

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