A crop and zoom of portion of PIA 19600: a sloppy crater, weird cross hatch cracks near the lower edge and another fleck of the uber bright stuff near the top.

How's this for a tweet?


Andy Rivkin ‏@asrivkin:
Russell: Can see haze in crater with bright spots at some local times. Bright spots "indicate Ceres is active today." #nesf2015


Chris Russell at the NASA Exploration Science Forum.

Phil

Pretty remarkable tweet. Did we earlier see a hazy appearance to the edges of the Spot #5 in Occator in some posted images?

Wow.

Very bold statement. It does jibe with the "bright spot is visible when it shouldn't" line that we got earlier. Let's see what evidence they got.

Wow.... that would pretty much wrap up the salt deposit hypothesis, right?

What appears to be a 3D model of Occator:



https://twitter.com/snnaka/status/623571917165821952

I also see four anomalies in the crater..dark strips or something. Could be plumes or something of whats causing the phenomenom

Let's wait for the mission scientists to declare the discovery of liquid water. 'Warm' ice could conceivably sublimate to form a mist of sorts, esp. if it's rapidly cooling again & recombining into ice crystals.

Bottom line: Interesting stuff, but not enough to draw conclusions.

You are correct...but for the record. Herschel detected liquid water erupting from somewhere.


Im all sorta of excited for the LAMO orbit

The blog entry:
"Russell’s update began with some relatively mundane results.... Russell then began to discuss the surface features on Ceres, and things rapidly became much less mundane."
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs...tor-rivkin.html

Not aware that any such claim was made. Water vapor was detected; that does not imply liquid water.

Not to argue semantics but water vapor implies evaporation of a liquid source that replenishes. Even if if the liquid is temporary

That is not correct. Although this phase diagram is not to scale, please note that the liquid phase is not possible at atmospheric pressures below 6 mb, which is obviously far higher than the effective vacuum on Ceres.

Ice on the surface of Ceres would sublimate directly into vapor if exposed to enough heat. Therefore, a plausible explanation for the purported 'mist' in Oculus may be local solar heating of ice.

Yep, and I'm starting to notice "white" spots on crater rims and on the plains. It seems that many of the light areas we saw early on were unresolved white spots. And given recent observations it would seem that Ceres is subtly more active than we imagined. It will be interesting to get some spectral data from these white spots when Dawn gets down to the Mapping Orbits.

--Bill