Researchers have discovered that the dwarf planet Ceres has an “ancient ocean” with salt water, which means that the space object may still be geologically active.
Using data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, seven research papers were published Monday in the scientific journals Nature Communications, Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy looking at Ceres’ Occator Crater, which is where scientists believe an ocean of brine , as “salt-enriched water,” exists. By analyzing Ceres’ gravity, experts were able to determine that the brine reservoir is about 25 miles below the surface and hundreds of miles wide.
“Dawn has achieved much more than we had hoped when she embarked on her extraordinary alien expedition,” said Mission Director Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement. “These exciting new discoveries from the end of its long and productive mission are a wonderful tribute to this remarkable interplanetary explorer.”
This mosaic of Ceres’ Occator Crater is composed of images from NASA’s Dawn mission, captured on its second extended mission in 2018. Bright pits and mounds (foreground) were formed by saline fluid released when the water-rich floor of Occator was frozen after the crater-shaped impact about 20 million years ago. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / USRA / LPI)
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Dawn joined Ceres in 2015 and the last contact with the craft was in October 2018.
The Occator Crater, a strange place with bright white spots that are salt deposits, has long been a source of interest to NASA. Rayman even mentioned it in a 2018 blog post. “Studying this one crater and the area around it (collectively known as a geological unit) could reveal more about the complex geology there,” he wrote at the time.
The crater is thought to be about 22 million years old, but the ice volcanoes that surround it can be billions of years old anywhere. The salt deposits could be as young as 2 million years old, according to one recently published study.
This mosaic of Ceres’ Occator Crater is composed of images from NASA’s Dawn mission, captured on its second extended mission, in 2018. Bright pits and mounds (foreground) were formed by saline fluid released when the water-rich floor of the Occator froze after the crater-forming impact about 20 million years ago. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / USRA / LPI)
“The 57-mile Occator Crater turned out to be the ‘star’ in terms of recent geologically active activity on the dwarf planet Ceres,” said planetary scientist David Williams of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration in a separate statement. “The light materials observed in this 22-million-year-old impact crater appear to have originated in the last 2 to 9 million years, indicating that there is still some internal heat left in Ceres.”
Further research is needed to determine their exact age.
“All the results suggest one or more brine reservoirs in the crust of Ceres, perhaps relics of an ancient ocean over this icy world,” added Williams, who is part of a team developing a concept for NASA to return to Ceres. . “When it comes to fruit, a sample mission could bring us some of these bright materials to Earth to definitively determine their origin.”
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In addition to being a dwarf planet, Ceres is also the largest known asteroid, with a diameter approaching 600 miles. It also contains the largest mountain on the largest known asteroid in the solar system, Ahuna Mons, which rises more than 13,000 feet. It is unclear exactly what caused the formation of Ahuna Mons, with its slopes adorned with vertical stripes, but NASA has a new theory.
One of the latest images of Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows bright spots in Occator Crater. Dawn captured this view on September 1, 2018, from an altitude of 3,340 miles (3,370 kilometers) above the surface of the dwarf planet.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA)
“The new hypothesis, based on a number of gravity short measurements, implies that a bubble of mud rose from deep within the dwarf planet and pushed through the icy surface at a weak point rich in reflective salt – and then frozen,” the space agency said in 2019. statement.
By comparison, the largest mountain on earth, Mount Everest, rises 29,029 feet.
Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and was first detected by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801.
In 2017, Dawn found the building blocks for life on the dwarf planet, with organic molecules detected that appeared to form on Ceres and not from a strike by an asteroid or comet.
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