Best image yet of those heaps of Nazi cocaine:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/0...n_7422262.html

From above link:


NASA's Dawn spacecraft captured the image on May 16, as it was orbiting 4,500 miles above the planet's surface. It had entered orbit on March 6. The space agency says the crater that harbors the bright spots is about 57 miles wide.

Scientists have been aware of the phenomenon since the Hubble Telescope captured images of Ceres in 2004. As the resolution of the photos taken has increased, so too has the curiosity of astronomers.

Current theories to explain the spots include ice -- potentially exposed by the impact of another celestial object, or perhaps spewed out by some sort of icy volcano or geyser -- or salt deposits.

"We have these bright spots that have the reflectivity of ice, and whose spectrum of reflected light is similar to that expected from ice. So ice is a good bet," said UCLA astronomer Christopher Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn Mission, in an email to NBC News.

"How is the ice getting to the surface, if it is ice?" Russell continued. "Is it coming out as a water/ice volcano and making a mountain of ice on the surface, or is there a hole there which has dug down to ice or water? And what is causing all the little bright spots near the big bright spot? We are sure there is some logical explanation for all this, but for now, we are just scratching our heads."

NASA notes that if Ceres' makeup is just 25 percent water, it may have more water "than all the fresh water on Earth."

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Also this: What Are Those Bright Spots on Ceres? Go Vote!


http://www.space.com/29469-ceres-bri...nasa-vote.html

From above link:


The puzzling white spots on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres are definitely reflecting sunlight, scientists said, but the cause of the marks remains a mystery.

The newest batch of images from the Dawn spacecraft, which began orbiting Ceres on March 6, was released May 15. The data gleaned from these images has increased Dawn scientists' confidence that the white spots are caused by reflected sunlight, and that idea can help them narrow down the possible candidates for the spots' contents.

With the release of these new images, NASA has asked the public to submit a guess for what is creating the spots: volcanos, geysers, rocks, ice, salt deposits, or "other." As of this writing, 37 percent of people who took NASA's poll for what the white spots might be said "other." Alien colonies, perhaps? About 30 percent of voters picked ice, with 10 percent opting for volcanoes. Geysers ranked next with 9 percent, followed by salt deposits (8 percent) and rock (6 percent).

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So what's your vote!

All ready told you it's ice.

Fixed NASA's post.

What if it is skanky Nazi ho water?

Patience pays off.

It's the Morse code D (-..) for Dawn!

It's obviously a broken left turn signal.

Who ceres?

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

New pictures of the Nazi diamond stash on Ceres.

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news-detail.html?id=4619

New pic.

At this point it is a confirmed alien base, right?

Bright Spots on Ceres

The investigation into the dwarf planet Ceres' mysterious bright spots has taken an intriguing new twist.

The famous bright spots at the bottom of Ceres' Occator crater appear to be sublimating material into space, creating a localized atmosphere within the walls of the 57-mile-wide (92 kilometers) hole in the ground, new observations by NASA's Dawn spacecraft suggest.

"If you look at a glancing angle, you can see what seems to be haze, and it comes back in a regular pattern," Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell, of UCLA, said during a presentation Tuesday (July 21) at the second annual NASA Exploration Science Forum, which took place at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The bright spots "are possibly subliming, or they're providing some atmosphere in this particular region of Ceres," Russell said. The haze covers about half of Occator crater and does not extend beyond the hole's rim, he added.

This new information would seem to bolster the argument of people who think Ceres' bright spots are composed of ice, rather than some sort of salt. (Those are the two leading possible explanations at the moment.)


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Guess it is.

Dover. Refraction from contrasting albedo values will give off a sort of holographic effect.

Probably would want to go up and see if you can get a couple cubes to drop into a drink.

That would be my favorite guess.

(Mundane, Occam-optimal guess being, well, calcium carbonate. Which is going to be reasonably difficult to pin down at distance if I'm not too far behind.)

Newer pic.



So I'm thinking force field or crystal dome; not sure yet.

Also has Gauss' application of the least-squares method to compute the orbit of Ceres been honored in this thread yet?

Better detail and imagery on those bright spots on Ceres, great images: (scroll down if you first don't see the article)

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/23/1129256...s-bright-spots

From above link:


Now they've gotten an even closer look. On Tuesday, NASA released the most detailed images yet from Dawn — taken just 240 miles above the surface. Here is Occator Crater, which contains the brightest of the bright spots:

The bright central spots near the center of Occator Crater are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Such views can be used to highlight subtle color differences on Ceres's surface.

The crater is 57 miles across and 2.5 miles deep. "The latest images," NASA announced, "taken from 240 miles above the surface of Ceres, reveal a dome — with fractures crisscrossing the top and flanks — in a smooth-walled pit in the bright center of the crater."

The still-mysterious origins of Ceres's shiny dots

So why is the crater shiny? In a paper published last December in Nature, scientists argued that the reflection may come from a magnesium sulfate called hexahydrite.

The idea is that Ceres has a salty layer of water ice just beneath its surface. At some point in the past, asteroids pummeled the dwarf planet, bringing that mixture to the surface. The water ice then evaporated away in the sun, leaving only the bright-colored hexahydrite behind. And because the rest of the planet is so dark, those bright spots stick out.

Still, this needs further exploration. The existence of subsurface water ice remains one of the central mysteries of Ceres.

Until the Dawn mission arrived in 2015, scientists had never seen Ceres up close. The dwarf planet, a 590-mile-wide ball of rock and ice that lies in the asteroid belt, was the biggest unexplored rock between the sun and Pluto.

Scientists have long wondered — based on measurements of the dwarf planet's mass — if Ceres might have vast amounts of ice in its mantle. Some speculated there might be as much fresh water locked away there as is present on all of Earth.

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scientists-find-organics-on-ceres-1602201723/

From above link:

Reporting in the February 17th Science, Maria Cristina De Sanctis (INAF Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Italy) and other members of NASA’s Dawn mission have found a big patch of organic compounds high in the northern hemisphere of the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is the largest member of the asteroid belt, and the Dawn spacecraft has been exploring it since 2015.

Organics are not surprising in of themselves. Scientists have found them in meteorites (many of which come from asteroids), and we’ve also seen hints of them on the main-belt asteroids 24 Themis and 65 Cybele. But the signal Dawn picked up is much clearer than the ones from those other asteroids.

The organics drape over the southwest floor and rim of the 50-km-wide crater Ernutet, with a few blobs nearby. However, the compounds don’t look to be connected to the crater itself; they're spread across about 1000 km2. Dawn also detected at least one more, much smaller deposit in Inamahari Crater, about 400 km from Ernutet.

Unfortunately, the scientists couldn’t actually tell what the stuff is, just that it looks like aliphatic organic material. Aliphatic and aromatic are two types of compounds. Aromatic organics have molecular rings of carbon atoms and are fairly “processed,” chemically speaking; aliphatic compounds instead generally have straight chains of carbon atoms and have been less affected by heat and radiation.

There are two reasons the result is interesting. One, Ceres also has tons of water ice, plus carbonates and salts. The addition of organic material makes the dwarf planet a promising environment for prebiotic chemistry.

Two, the organics don’t seem to have been delivered by impacts — no clear cause-and-effect with particular craters, plus a hit probably would have distributed the stuff in diluted form along with other debris. Not to mention there’s other, clearly native material mixed in. Instead, the organics likely come from Ceres itself. Perhaps they’ve been brought up from below by some process, although how remains an open question. Scientists also recently suggested the little world might have a history of ice volcanoes, so maybe it’s more active than we suspected.

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