Asteroid Ceres sports bright salts and hints of buried water ice

BBC : Pluto tends to steal the show in planetary science these days, but Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid, is offering up some surprises of its own. New data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, reveal evidence of buried water ice and offer an unprecedented look at a mysterious bright region in the middle of a crater. The probe’s GRaND instrument has remotely probed the chemistry of the asteroid’s surface and found large concentrations of hydrogen at high latitudes. Those hydrogen atoms may be part of water molecules frozen just under the surface. The new images of Ceres’s puzzling bright spot show a feature resembling a fried egg. Scientists suspect the feature is largely composed of magnesium sulfate salts that remained on the surface after the water that accompanied them vented into space. Dawn‘s orbit now has the probe just 385 km above the surface of Ceres.