Just as Pluto soon is revealing a lot of its secrets, so will Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt, containing a third of the mass of the entire belt. Discovered in 1801, it was first considered a planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)

Space probe Dawn, launched in 2007, passing and exloring asteroid Vesta earlier, will arrive 6 March 2015 at Ceres. The images of Ceres will exceed those of Hubble in a couple of days from now, January 26.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(spacecraft)


Ceres January 13:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(s...-Animation.gif

What is that white spot? We'd better follow it as it gets clearer and clearer!

My first hypothesis is they are flashes of energy from David Sklansky's disembodied brain.

Your hypothesis will be tested. That's what science is for. As it looks now I don't have much to prove you wrong.

Ceres version of the Las Vegas strip. Most of the UFO sightings are craft on the way too Ceres to play Keno. They just stop here cuz gas costs less.

Here you are free to imagine Ceres: dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/dawncommunity/imagine_ceres.asp

Could that white spot be something a giant (maybe God?) is ready to snort?

So what’s the over under on finding life on Ceres?

There is a distinct possibility of liquid water sandwiched between the ice and rocky core. Although not to the same extent as Europa.

Don't think it's that interesting.
We'll maybe get some answers soon. Is there ice covering the surface? If not I can't really see how liquid water could exist. Vesta looked like a rock fwiw. The asteroids don't have the outside gravitational pull that generates heat as when it comes to the moons of the big planets.

Ceres probably has ~10^17 kgr water below its surface that may prove a very valuable resource because of the small energy requirement to extract it from the surface to destinations of interest in the inner solar system that space colonies may be assembled.

In your opinion guys what do you think is the minimum requirement for water for a human to be sustained in an ecosystem that is self sufficient technologically and only imports resources for industrial usage but then maintains its structure without concern for the amount of energy needed for such maintenance and recycling?

I mean if you recycle everything eventually every few weeks at the most what is the total requirement per person when you include industrial applications also to the standard food production and personal hygiene etc needs a human has?

I imagine you do not need more than 100 lt per day for all your needs in a well designed society and even if another 100 for industrial usages per day per human and the system recycles it with period of 1 month then 10^10 humans in space will need about ~10 m^3 per human or at a minimum 10^14 m^3= 10^17 kgr. That is almost as much as Ceres has. So the water of Ceres can support with immense luxury 10 bil humans in space. A very advanced society can find ways to need even 10 times less or 100 times less than that without losing anything in terms of quality of life if it can spend a lot more energy for it to recover it faster and use it more efficiently in super intelligent homes and industry.

We will need to have all this water available eventually until we manage to build fusion powered ships that can extract hydrogen from the gas giants' atmospheres (purely for the deuterium but they get standard Hydrogen anyway too in the process of refining) and then transfer it under pressure, eg liquid, to destinations of interest to synthesize water with Oxygen extracted locally in such locations that have lots of Oxygen eg Venus (in CO2 form) or Mars in various oxides but lack Hydrogen.

Water in space is very very valuable because Hydrogen is hard to find in most planets as it has escaped over the billions of years.

So if you have enough energy you can put to good use all these resources in your effort to build in space amazing quality structures.

Just go and get it! Clearly closer than Pluto.

We are getting there...



http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/live_shots.asp

~150 mill km/AU X 0.001585AU ~=240,000 km: less than the distance from Earth to our Moon left.

Sharpest ever view, Jan 25

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/...ce_gallery.asp



We are starting to see the craters themselves. White spot sharper, brighter and smaller, what is it??

This was the analysis before these pictures, Jan 23: http://www.space.com/28336-mysteriou...-on-ceres.html

May be one of the greatest discoveries to be done in space exploration history, imo.

In the end of the sequence there maybe is a shadow at the "south" of the white spot? Maybe it's a smaller asteroid that has collided with Ceres, a great part of it sticking up? Would maybe be possible with the low gravity not to get it smashed up into pieces? "North" of the white spot is a darker area also, shadow of a crater the smaller asteroid made?

Ice? The most obvious explanation? What if Ceres erupts water (or some solution of various things) from the interior and once it gets out it freezes like lava freezes on earth. So maybe some liquid material came to surface and expanded out and now reflects more light than the other areas nearby hence the contrast.

From your link "Scientists have observed water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Ceres, which may erupt from volcano-like ice geysers."

Maybe an impact crater, and water etc. coming up from Ceres when it got molten from the heat of the impact, blending with the material of the colliding object.

Feb 4, 145,000km away. White spot an ordinary volcano?



http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/...ce_gallery.asp

An active volcano would be something, other than Earth, Io and possably Venus there are'nt a lot around. To my mind it would also catapalt the probablity of life well into single figures, maybe more - lots of water + geophermal energy.

Dawn's ion engine

Still interested? Famous white spot a memory. Was it an artifact through photo enhancement?

Feb 12, and 83,000 kilometers left:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/...ce_gallery.asp



Science is dull but hard to beat.

I still see some small white spots on the images. I think they may be surface expressions of underground bunkers full of cloned Nazis. I am eager to see better images as they come in. Science to me is never dull.

Your enthusiasm is almost contagious.

FYP

It looks like a golf ball

Nazis played golf. QED.

And Hitler allegedly had just one ball.

NSFW

Which of them is the REAL white spot?



The last one seems EVEN WHITER than the rest.

Seeing things that don't exist can't make science a favor. You can't fool me anymore.

They could stop "enhancing" the photograps and show what really can be seen and hence, possiby is there.

The one on the left looks like the lights from New York City.

PTB