Some Dawn scientists think that the dome in the centre of Occator is a cryovolcanic feature about 4 million years old (Occator itself is stated as being 34 million years old), and that at this point, it cannot be ruled out that cryovolcanic activity is still present at a lower level. The haze interpretation is also doubled down on, and it is mentioned that it could be possibly be evidence for ongoing activity.



http://www.mps.mpg.de/Cryovolcanism-on-Dwarf-Planet-Ceres

It's almost as if the gulley near Oppy had to have been exhumed, it just looks too surficial to be that ancient, perhaps what we see is just a lingering remnant of its once lower reaches, though I have no idea if we know how deep these slopes have been eroded over the eons.

What's neat about strongly radioactive gases or liquids on the surface of a cold world? Well, let's look for a second at what would happen on a cold world with radon snow/frost.

Radon has a freezing point of 202K at 1atm - not super cold, but it would at least have to be colder than Mars. Picture a body with high radon emissions per unit area and an atmospheric temperature below the freezing point of radon. After emission, one might encounter radon snow, radon rime around vents, or other such features - possibly even (diluted) liquid in the right conditions. Liquid and solid radon have an intense radioluminescent glow. Any area that deposited in even small amounts of liquid or solid radon ice or snow would glow in the dark. Liquid radon ranges in glow color from blue-green to lilac. Solid radon changes color with time, starting out blue, then yellow, then orangish-red:

https://books.google.is/books?id=T0Iiv0BJ1E...p;q&f=false

So not only would the whole landscape be lit up, but it would be lit up with different colors based on when the material was precipitated out. And it would look different every day as the radon decayed. If there was an atmosphere (such as nitrogen), it could form glowing clouds (droplets, ice crystals) that likewise change color with time. Streams of different ages would mix together in a blending of rainbow glows. The ultimate fate of any ices and liquids would be to plate out as shiny metallic lead at the end of their decay chains.

It takes a long time to bring an experiment to the ISS. Each element has to go through tons of review to make sure it won't compromise the platform. Environments can be simulated fine enough on the ground at much lower cost.

This seems unlikely to me. These "barnacle mountains" (I love the term) each have a pit at the top.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...naria_shell.jpg

... The upper bounds of the time taken for tidal locking for the system seems to be in the region of 100 Mya so the tidal locking is not in any way an indication of extended age and associated expectation of extensive impact craters.

True, but extremely viscous material doesn't flow in Benard cells structures at the km scale. I doubt you could even find Benard cells in extremely viscous tars at the beaker scale. With extremely viscous materials and a glacial pace of heat flow loss, the organized heat flow at high viscosity would be tiny compared to the heat flow dissipation in competing radiative loss and local chaotic convection, and so the nice organized flow pattern which creates the hexagonal structure would be lost (signal to noise problem, essentially). Just my 2 cents.

Caught Alan Stern giving a brief interview to an NPR program (Science Friday) this afternoon - nothing new to anyone on the board, but he sounded excited (and fairly well rested ) - it's also nice hearing him speak rather than reading a press release. Oh - one thing he mentioned that was new to me, perhaps it was posted earlier - they're between two targets for an early 2019 flyby of a Kuiper Belt object.

So not quite the last chance for us to experience encountering strange new worlds.

This piece is not about any specific mission, even though the swirls have been imagined by orbiters.
I might be relevant since it could give an insight for some various features we discuss on this forum.
Crashing comets may explain mysterious lunar swirls