WASHINGTON: The patches baffled boffins who didn’t expect the worldlet to shine so bright, or indeed shine much at all. Tinfoil-hatters quickly came up with all sorts of theories about the patches, especially after NASA had nothing to say about them for days after the Dawn spacecraft spotted the two shiny spots.
We now know that silence was caused by Dawn swinging around to Ceres’ dark side and readying itself for serious science. The probe will be in low orbit as of April 23rd, which is when it’s expected it will be able to get nice close-ups at high resolution to give us better ideas about why the shiny spots are so bright.
For now, we have to make do with pics like this GIF of Ceres turning (it’s nearly 1MB, so we’ve left it out of the story to keep page load times pleasant).
The GIF’s not as good as things are expected to get, but NASA says even these shots are telling us more about Ceres, including the presence of “heavy cratering”.
NASA released the GIF on Monday, five days after capture. On that timetable, we should be looking at close-ups of Ceres on about April 28th. By which time the tinfoil hats should really be starting to chafe.
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