Dawn observes haze on Ceres
JUL 22, 2015
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029058
Nature : A mysterious haze has been detected hovering over the Occator crater on the dwarf planet Ceres. The observation was made by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which in March detected bright spots peppering Ceres’s surface. Occator has one large bright spot at its center and several smaller ones scattered nearby. Mission scientists have proposed that the bright spots are composed of some highly reflective material, such as ice or salt; the presence of the haze seems to point to sublimating ice. It is hoped that as Dawn‘s IR spectrometer continues to map Ceres’s surface, it will eventually be able to determine definitively what it is.
© 2015 American Institute of Physics
