NEW DELHI: A cosmic mystery is unfolding millions of kilometers away as NASA's spacecraft Dawn approaches the protoplanet Ceres. The most recent pictures taken by Dawn when it was 46,000 kilometers away from Ceres show two bright glowing spots next to each other. Earlier images with less resolution had shown only one bright spot.
"Ceres' bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Using its ion propulsion system, Dawn will enter orbit around Ceres on March 6. As scientists receive better and better views of the dwarf planet over the next 16 months, they hope to gain a deeper understanding of its origin and evolution by studying its surface. The intriguing bright spots and other interesting features of this captivating world will come into sharper focus.
"The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany.
Ceres is the largest of the asteroids in the asteroid belt which lies between Mars and Jupiter. It is about 950kms wide and is thought to be composed of rocks and ice. Scientists believe that it was born about 4.57 billion years ago when the Solar System was itself in the process of forming.
Dawn visited the giant asteroid Vesta from 2011 to 2012, delivering more than 30,000 images of the body along with many other measurements, and providing insights about its composition and geological history. Vesta has an average diameter of 525 kilometers. Vesta and Ceres are the two most massive bodies in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter.
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