Biggest mysteries about the dwarf planet Ceres

According to a new study by scientists with NASA’s Dawn mission, the brightest area on Ceres, located inside Occator Crater, has the highest concentration of carbonate minerals ever observed anywhere other than Earth.

This world’s name is Ceres, and it is now under scrutiny by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which began orbiting the dwarf planet in March 2015. Dawn identified more than 130 bright spots on the planet, and what it seems to be inside the holes have shocked Scientists; salt (magnesium sulfate) or also called hexahydrite.

“Ceres is probably from the outer solar system or made from materials that formed far away from the Sun”, says Maria Cristina de Sanctis, a planetary scientist at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy and lead author of the paper.

According to De Sanctis’ study, it was found that most of the mineral of Ceres’ bright spots is sodium carbonate, a kind of salt found on Earth in hydrothermal environments. The upwelling of the material suggests that temperatures inside Ceres are warmer than previously believed. The salts could be the residue of localized bodies of water or oceans that flowed to the surface and then froze millions of years ago.

Those scientists said Wednesday that the dominant mineral in the bright area of the Occator Crater is sodium carbonate. “Carbonates support the idea that Ceres had interior hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials to the surface within Occator”. Instead, her analysis points to sodium carbonate.

The carbonate finding further reinforces Ceres’ connection with icy worlds in the outer Solar System. This kind of a deposit is inconsistent with material that may have come there because of a collision with asteroids. Some of these compounds have also been detected in the plume of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon Enceladus. The exotic minerals present on Ceres may point to an outer solar system origin, which would make this world a missing link between ice in Kuiper belt and oceans on Earth.

Embedded in the asteroid belt is a dwarf planet that features a 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) pyramid-shaped mountain and intriguing bright patches that scientists are still trying to understand. Dawn entered orbit around Ceres in March 2015. The theory is that the salt was unearthed when asteroids hit the surface. “The work I did before arrival suggested that if Ceres is ice rich, the craters should become relatively flattened over short timescales”, Bland said, explaining how the slow migration of subsurface ice would uplift the crater floors, causing them to become shallow.

The historic mission is the first to orbit two extraterrestrial solar system targets, and the first to orbit any object in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. “We thought that everyone we had talked to about this plan was enthusiastic about it”, says Chris Russell, the mission principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dawn’s mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

The prevailing opinion was that Ceres had a rocky core surrounded by a layer of ice, with a rocky surface on top.

A look at the Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres-representing some of its impressive achievements numerically.

“The New Horizons mission to Pluto exceeded our expectations, and even today the data from the spacecraft continue to surprise”, Jim Green, NASA’s Director of Planetary Science, said in a statement Friday (July 1). The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are worldwide partners on the mission team.