Four-Mile-High Mountains on Ceres Noticed by NASA’s Dawn Space Probe

Ceres – the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – rose to fame past year when NASA scientists spotted mysterious bright dots on its surface.

The colour-coded map gives researchers a brilliant in depth view of the dwarf planet’s surface features, which they haven’t had access to before. These new maps have been shared by the Dawn spacecraft of NASA. The maps reveal the compositional and elevational differences across Ceres, and leaving several mysteries for the scientific community and astronomers. According to him, every time experts at NASA examine images and events taking place on the dwarf planet, they come across new revolutionary facts. Bright spots of Ceres are mysteries for scientists since their discovery.

The maps show various approved names for the features on Ceres that are based on spirits, deities and festivals from different global cultures. For example, a 12 extensive (20 km) mountain close to Ceres’ north shaft now bears the designation Ysolo Mons, after a celebration in Albania denoting the first day of the eggplant harvest, NASA authorities said.

The brightest spot on Ceres has been named Occator crater.

Also confusing mission managers is a solitary four-mile high summit called the “Lonely Mountain”.

“They are very different from the bowl-shaped craters on Vesta”, said Raymon. Dawn will begin in October and continue till December and descend to its lowest and final orbit, an altitude of 230 miles (375 kilometers). As the Dawn spacecraft continues collecting data, they hope to find a few answers. It will remain operational at least through mid-2016. For those who don’t know: the said spacecraft has been orbiting Ceres since March.

While ideally the mission was meant to discover more about the dwarf planet, in many ways it has only made it more mysterious.

“We believe this is a huge salt deposit”, Dawn’s principal investigator Chris Russell told a crowd of scientists Monday at the European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes, France, in a talk that was posted online Thursday.

Back in May, Russell speculated that the spots are caused by “the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice”. “We have absolutely no idea what that blue ring is due to”, said Russell during a news conference, according to the BBC. Even a few of Ceres’ mountains are smeared with shiny streaks.