Ceres from a sequence taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft April 24 – 26, 2015, from a distance of 13,500 km (8,500 mi).This is an image of Ceres taken last weekend, shortly after Dawn entered into its RC3 orbit. About the time this image was being taken, I was giving a lecture titled “The Dawn Mission at Dwarf Planet Ceres” at Penguicon. I’d edited my older “Dawn at Vesta” lecture, added some history about Ceres, and a few old maps and engravings showing the Solar System changing over the first half of the Nineteenth-Century.
I added as many Ceres approach and orbit insertion images as I could, animated wherever possible, but I *ahem* didn’t have any science results to discuss, except for the single false-color map of Ceres’ surface:
This map-projected view of Ceres was created from images taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft during its initial approach to the dwarf planet, prior to being captured into orbit in March 2015. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAI briefly discussed the controversy of the “Mysterious Bright Spots.” I mentioned how dark the surface of Ceres is (Ceres’ albedo is lower than our Moon’s), how much less light Ceres receives than Earth (~150 W/m2 -vs- 1366 W/m2 at Earth), and that the bright spots might be bright because of image overexposure. Are they lighter-colored ices underneath Ceres’ dark surface? Jets? An entrance into a hollow spaceship-like interior? (No, seriously… a friend is jokingly taunting me with this “hypothesis”…)
Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft during approach. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDAWe’ll know more in coming weeks; Science is happening NOW at Ceres, and I can barely contain my excitement! I hope to have some actual science results to report when I give my Dawn at Ceres lecture to the Warren Astronomical Society at Cranbrook Institute of Science on June 1st.
