HONG KONG: NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has captured more images of mysterious bright spots on Ceres, and also spotted a baffling pyramid-shaped peak towering over a relatively flat landscape on the dwarf planet.
The latest images of Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show a mountain with steep slopes protruding from a relatively smooth area of the dwarf planet’s surface. The structure rises about 5 kilometres above the surface.
“The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly,” Raymond said.
Dawn has been studying the dwarf planet in detail from its second mapping orbit, which is 4,400 kilometres above Ceres.
A new view of its intriguing bright spots, located in a crater about 90 kilometres across, shows even more small spots in the crater than were previously visible, NASA said.
At least eight spots can be seen next to the largest bright area, which scientists think is approximately 9 kilometres wide.
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