Video caption: Take a tour of weird Ceres! Visit a 2-mile-deep crater and a 4-mile-tall mountain in the video narrated by mission director Marc Rayman. Get your red/blue glasses ready for the finale – a global view of the dwarf planet in 3D. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/LPI/PSI
Mysterious bright spots and a pyramidal shaped mountain star in a daunting new flyover video of dwarf planet Ceres created from imagery gathered by NASA’s history making Dawn mission – the first ever to visit any dwarf planet which simultaneously ranks as the largest world in the main asteroid belt residing between Mars and Jupiter.
Ceres was nothing more than a fuzzy blob to humankinds most powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), until the probe swooped in this year and achieved orbit on March 6, 2015.
The newly released, stunning video takes takes you on a tour like none before for a global cruise over the most fascinating features on Ceres – including the 2-mile-deep (4-km-deep) crater dubbed Occator and a towering 4-mile-tall (6 kilometer-tall) mountain as tall as any in North America.
The spectacular flyover animation was generated from high resolution images taken by Dawn’s framing camera during April and May and is narrated by Marc Rayman, Dawn Chief Engineer and Mission Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
The video concludes with a 3D view, so you’ll need to whip out your handy red/blue glasses for the finale – a global view of the dwarf planet in 3D.
From the orbital altitude at that time ranging from about 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers) to 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers), the highest-resolution regions on Ceres have a resolution of 1,600 feet (480 meters) per pixel.
Pockmarked Ceres is an alien world unlike any other in our solar system, replete with unexplained bright spots and craters of many sizes, large and small.
Occatur has captured popular fascination world-wide because the 60 miles (90 kilometers) diameter crater is rife with a host of the bodies brightest spots and whose nature remains elusive to this day, nearly half a year after Dawn arrived in orbit this past spring.
“Now, after a journey of 3.1 billion miles (4.9 billion kilometers) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home,” says Rayman.
The crater is named after the Roman agriculture deity of harrowing, a method of pulverizing and smoothing soil.
Dawn is an international science mission managed by NASA and equipped with a trio of science instruments from the US, Germany and Italy. The framing camera was provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR), provided by Italy is an imaging spectrometer that examines Ceres in visible and infrared light.
Dawn’s science team is using the instruments to investigate the light reflecting from Occator at different wavelengths.
From a distance, the crater appeared to be home to a duo of bright spots that looked like a pair of eyes. As Dawn moves ever closer, they became more resolved and now are split into dozens of smaller bright spots.
Although some early speculation centered on the spots possibly being consistent with water ice or salts, newly gathered data “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,” according to the scientists.
“The science team is continuing to evaluate the data and discuss theories about these bright spots at Occator,” said Chris Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement.
“We are now comparing the spots with the reflective properties of salt, but we are still puzzled by their source. We look forward to new, higher-resolution data from the mission’s next orbital phase.”
Occator lies in Ceres northern hemisphere.
The huge pyramidal mountain lies farther to the southeast of Occator – at 11 degrees south, 316 degrees east.
Based on the latest calculations, the mountain sits about 4 miles (6 kilometers) high, with respect to the surface around it. That make it roughly the same elevation as Mount McKinley in Denali National Park, Alaska, the highest point in North America.
The Texas-sized world is slightly smaller than previously thought. Based on new measurements from Dawn, Ceres’ average diameter to 584 miles (940 kilometers), compared to earlier estimates of 590 miles (950 kilometers).
Dawn made history in March when it simultaneously became the first probe from Earth to reach Ceres as well as the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies.
It had previously visited Vesta. After achieving orbit in July 2011, Dawn became the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit a body in the main Asteroid Belt.
In sharp contrast to rocky Vesta, Ceres is an icy world.
Scientists believe that Ceres may harbor an ocean of subsurface liquid water as large in volume as the oceans of Earth below a thick icy mantle despite its small size – and thus could be a potential abode for life. Overall Ceres is estimated to be about 25% water by mass.
“We really appreciate the interest in our mission and hope they are as excited as we have been about these scientific surprises,” Russell told Universe Today.
“Since we are only just beginning our investigation, I expect that there will be more surprises. So please stick with us!”
As Dawn spirals down to a lower orbit of about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) above Ceres (and then even lower) using its ion engines, new answers and new mysteries are sure to be forthcoming.
“There are many other features that we are interested in studying further,” said Dawn science team member David O’Brien, with the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.
“These include a pair of large impact basins called Urvara and Yalode in the southern hemisphere, which have numerous cracks extending away from them, and the large impact basin Kerwan, whose center is just south of the equator.”
The mission is expected to last until at least June 2016 depending upon fuel reserves.
Dawn was launched on September 27, 2007 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II Heavy rocket from Space Launch Complex-17B (SLC-17B) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Donno WHERE we readers would be on the weekends if it wasn’t for your continuing efforts Ken. They are appreciated… especially when they include the detailed and fascinating panorama’s you and Marco Di Lorenzo create… I may be repeating myself, but GOOD JOB!
Isn’t that ‘fresh looking’ crater next to the 4 mile high mountain an interesting feature! It looks like the impacter dug deeply enough into the crust to create a major crack, or conduit for then molten subsurface liquids to well up and create a steeply inclined (Low gravity allows) cryo volcano?
Sweet…
I wish whoever made this helps ESA do a similar illustration out of Rosetta data. Amazingly great work of art. They can put Mona Lisa in the attic now. And I repeat you Aqua, it’s just wow.
Skiing from the top of that “black top pyramid” (without a name?) to the bottom of the crater could take a whole 4½ hour long day in less than .03 G. There should be a warning sign there saying: “Snowboarding is different here.”
They are looking for a natural explanation of the great pyramids in Giza now, pyramids are simple natural shapes that can occur spontaneously. Volcanism, erosion, sand storms, luck, grasshoppers, anything. But the only source for that is myself, and I wouldn’t trust him. The Sphinx with a woman’s face, a lions body and an eagle’s wings is hard to explain anyway.
Right, the reason the Pyramids have lasted so long is that the shape is fundamentally stable. The same is true on planetary bodies, where natural processes happen to bring that shape about.
Thank you Aqua. Upcoming data gathering and analysis is required to answer your good questions. it will take time. pls stay tuned
What does a spectrograph say of these bright spots? Why is there even a mystery?
From what I’ve read, the spectrograph has a very low degree of resolution – in other words, at the altitude from which the images have been taken so far, it cannot resolve the bright spots from the surrounding areas. We should get more detailed and localized info from the orbit to which it is currently moving, and from the orbit it will enter after that.
if 4 miles is 6 kilometres then 2 miles is 3 km
The Texas-sized world is slightly larger, it should have been smaller
The pyramid is likely ejecta from the crater next to it. Turned upside down and realigned, the pyramid looks like it would fit perfectly in the crater.
If I didn’t know any better…….and I probably don’t, it almost looks like
if you flipped that mountain over and rotated it……it would fit in that
crater?
I have really been enjoying these great educational articles! We’ve been using them to try and teach my grandkids more about the world/solar system they live in, since their schools do such a poor job.
Thank you, and please keep them coming.
Also, thank you for mentioning exaggerated vertical relief in the captions. A barrier to understanding if it gets stripped out. Same with “artist’s impression”, “not to scale” and “false color” tags.
Maybe Lights coming from underground from some type of alien life .