What Are Those Bright Regions?

SCIENCE CORNER

This color-coded topographic map of Occator crater is based on Dawn’s observations at an altitude of 2,700 miles. The deep blue is 5,150 below a reference level, and brown is 14,025 feet above it. Brown is used in place of white for the elevation, so white can show the bright regions (Photo – NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA).

Among the questions scientists are grappling with is what the nature of Ceres’ bright regions is.

By Dr. Marc D. Rayman

There are many places on Ceres that display strikingly reflective material but nowhere as prominently as in Occator crater. Even as Dawn approached Ceres, the mysterious reflections shone out far into space, mesmerizing and irresistible, as if to guide or even seduce a passing ship into going closer. Our intrepid interplanetary adventurer, compelled not by this cosmic invitation but rather by humankind’s still more powerful yearning for new knowledge and new insights, did indeed venture in. Now it has acquired excellent pictures and beautiful spectra that will help determine the composition and perhaps even how the bright areas came to be. Thanks to the extraordinary power of the scientific method, we can look forward to explanations. (And while you wait, you can register your vote here for what the answer will be).

Ceres lives
in a rough
neighborhood

Scientists also puzzle over the number and distribution of craters. We mentioned before the possibility that ice being mixed in as a major component on or near the surface would cause the material to flow, albeit very slowly on the scale of a human lifetime. But over longer times, the glacially slow movement might prove significant. Most of Ceres’ craters are excavated by impacts from some of the many bodies that roam that part of the solar system. Ceres lives in a rough neighborhood, and being the most massive body between Mars and Jupiter does not give it immunity to assaults. Indeed, its gravity makes it even more susceptible, attracting passersby. But once a crater is formed, the scar might be expected to heal as the misshapen ground gradually recovers. In some ways this is similar to when you remove pressure from your skin. What may be a deep impression relaxes, and after a while, the original mark (or, one may hope, Marc) is gone. But Ceres has more craters than some scientists had anticipated, especially at low latitudes where sunlight provides a faint warming. Apparently the expectation of the gradual disappearance of craters was not quite right.

Is there less evidence of flowing ground material because the temperature is lower than predicted (causing the flow to be even slower), because the composition is not quite what was assumed, or because of other reasons? Moreover, craters are not distributed as would be expected for random pummeling; some regions display significantly more craters than others. Investigating this heterogeneity may give further insight into the geological processes that have taken place and are occurring now on this dwarf planet.

Dr. Marc D. Rayman is the Dawn Mission Director and Chief Engineer at JPL. Marc greatly enjoys sharing the thrill of interplanetary adventures with the public.