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NASA Space

Close-Up Images Show Ceres' Bright Spots In Great Detail 43

Posted by samzenpus from the pretty-pictures dept.
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.
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Close-Up Images Show Ceres' Bright Spots In Great Detail More

Close-Up Images Show Ceres' Bright Spots In Great Detail

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  • So let me get this staight: a probe arrived to investigate Cere's 'mysterious' bright spot in more detail than ever...
    Well just hang on to the image in your head and don't look at the pictures from the article . You're bound to get dissapointed...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You're bound to get dissapointed...

      Depending which previous headlines you've seen, you're going to be disappointed anyway. These spots aren't like glowing beacons outshining anything we can think of, like some news seems to suggest. They are just spots that are about 30-40% reflective, half that of metal, against a surface that has mostly the albedo of asphalt.

    • Re:Images... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Thursday September 10, 2015 @06:36AM (#50493393) Homepage

      Well just hang on to the image in your head and don't look at the [truth]

      say most religions.

      You're bound to get dissapointed...

      What's so disappointing? What were you hoping for? A crashed alien spaceship? Cthulhu?

      I'm not disappointed in the slightest. This is awesome science.

      • What's so disappointing? What were you hoping for? A crashed alien spaceship? Cthulhu?

        I'm not disappointed in the slightest. This is awesome science.

        I was kind of hoping for Brown Jenkin myself.

      • What were you hoping for? A crashed alien spaceship?

        That bright smudge looks a whole lot like the splattered contents of a warp core to me.

        I bet some aliens planned to safely jump out of hyperspace in the large gap between planets in our solar system, but it just wasn't their day, and they ended up leaving that huge crater. Probably their last words were something like: "That's no moon... It's a frigging dwarf planet! Hard to starboard!"

      • Not for nothing, if pictures did show a crashed spaceship, the headlines would read "Contact Lost with Ceres Probe".

      • What's so disappointing? What were you hoping for? A crashed alien spaceship? Cthulhu?

        An alien mining operation of course, I'd expect running into aliens doing something mundane is more likely than some epic first contact.

  • The bright spots must surely be exposed ice. There are other bright spots on Ceres, typically on steep slopes where the regolith has slid away. Maybe exposed ice on Ceres is bedrock.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      Apparently the surface temp is -38C in the sun. I doubt thats cold enough to stop ice subliming over the eons if exposed to vacuum so if it is ice its probably relatively newly exposed.

    • Re:Exposed ice? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday September 10, 2015 @05:37AM (#50493285) Homepage

      What I've read from following the story at the Planetary Society blog (and assuming I'm remembering correctly) is that the team does not find the spectra of the bright spots to be indicative of ice thusfar. They still don't know what they are but salts of some sort are a leading hypothesis.

      Very interesting terrain coming into view here - and not just how the bright areas seem to all be localized depressions. There's a lot of fine, very straight rift/fissure structures, like some sort of horst/graben terrain, tracing their way across the crater. Almost like Enceladus's tiger stripes or some of the rifting on Europa. We also see such terrain here in Iceland due to continental spreading. The features run parallel to each other locally but the directions are different in different parts of the crater, so whatever the cause of the pressure differential, it's nonuniform across the crater. Really fascinating to see!

      If I had to speculate wildly... I'd wager that it might be a sign of localized (and perhaps extinct) soda cryovolcanism [sciencedaily.com] like on Enceladus, with the water sublimated off and only the salts left behind. But that's just me talking out my arse ;)

      • Re:Exposed ice? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday September 10, 2015 @05:55AM (#50493311) Homepage

        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! :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by invid ( 163714 )

        Please mod parent up 'informative'.

        I read the article, was disappointed by how little information there was in it, and came here to get some informed commentary. I'm actually getting a little verklempt, reminded of the way slashdot used to be.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alfredo ( 18243 )
        New impacts on the Moon are white.

      • I see there's a meandering channel-like feature at the 6 o'clock position that looks a bit like the ones that have people saying 'water?' when they see them on Mars...

    • I choose to believe we're looking at the ruins of an alien spacecraft.

      Let the new international space race begin...

    • They could be patches of frozen water or CO2 crystals that emerged from those areas as a vapour then mediately cooled to rain down around their point of origin. That would explain how they have a high albedo over such a wide range of viewing angles. Shiny shiny crystals. Once there is enough of them reflecting sunlight the surface cools enough to stop the outflow of vapour from whatever the original impact crater/s exposed.

  • inverse (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I know the topographic map shows a crater but every time I look at the photo full screen it REALLY looks to me like the whole "crater" is actually a volcanic mound with an ice volcano in the centre. I mean just look at the lines around the slopes... that to me indicates the direction that stuff falls (i.e. rubble build up at the bottom). I just can't see a "crater" when I look at that... (what is see is similar to Olympos Mons)...

    • It's the direction of the light. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      We expect it to be coming from above. This seems to happen often with
      nasa images, the light is coming from every-which-way.

      If you rotate it 180 or 270 degrees it looks more like a crater.
      Hmm... googling... jpegtran will do this for you.

      jpegtran -rotate 180 ceres.jpg > ceresflip.jpg

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dins ( 2538550 )
      If you picture it as sunlight coming from left to right (as if the sun was on the left side of the picture) it looks like a mound. If you picture it as sunlight coming from right to left it looks like a crater.
  • Just had a discussion with my boss about these things humanity sends out there in relation to the apparent pile of faulty crap that people are confronted with on earth. Our space probes' softwares are shockingly successful.when one looks at the robustness and stability of these things. I wonder what sort of lesson this can give us beyond the one about pile of money thrown on it.

    • Re:SW in space (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday September 10, 2015 @06:28AM (#50493363) Homepage

      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.

    • I wonder what sort of lesson this can give us beyond the one about pile of money thrown on it.

      Nope, it's just that. Want a PVR with a 99.999% certainty of recording everything you ask it to over a period of ten years? You won't be able to afford one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )

      I wonder what sort of lesson this can give us beyond the one about pile of money thrown on it.

      Yup, all it takes is time and money. Ask your boss how many years and how many billions of dollars he's willing to spend.

    • We have ultra-reliable software here on Earth too; what do you think powers our planes and car engine controllers? When was the last time your car's ECU or ABS controller "crashed" and had to be rebooted?

      We accept it on our PCs because we're cheap and stupid and use Microsoft software there, and we consumers would prefer to have the tiled, flat Metro UI and "telemetry" sending all our keystrokes to MS rather than demand more reliability.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        We have ultra-reliable software here on Earth too; what do you think powers our planes and car engine controllers? When was the last time your car's ECU or ABS controller "crashed" and had to be rebooted?

        And getting less reliable all the time do to increasing integration and complexity.

  • Or, do we have to rely on the "high priest" named NASA for the images (e.g,. interpretation) they graciously provide to us?

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