Dawn's first orbit, including RC3, March 6, 2015- June 15, 2015 Options

[Ron Hobbs]

Dawn is now officially in orbit around (1) Ceres!

Congratulations, NASA. Nice images of crescent Ceres.

NASA Spacecraft Becomes First to Orbit a Dwarf Planet

[volcanopele]

Those look like compression artifacts to me. I think the "Spot 5" bright spots are still saturated in the released images.

[alk3997]

Those look like compression artifacts to me. I think the "Spot 5" bright spots are still saturated in the released images.

Lots of compression artifacts when zoomed in. Below is a 4x view of white spot 5 with very little processing from the original.



The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

I have to agree that almost none of the bright area is resolved even in this view. However, it almost looks to me that the main bright area is a mound covered by bright material. But that is certainly more imagination than analysis.

Andy

[dvandorn]

The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

Yeah -- the dark streak appears to be a shadow cast by a ridge of some type, as the sun is coming from the bottom of the image. In addition, the extreme blow-up, while rife with compression artifacts, does show that the uppermost of the small white spots is also casting a shadow in the proper direction. It's the only one of the white spots that shows a shadow above it, although that might be more because the reflections are saturating the pixels so much that the shadows from the larger spots are being wiped out.

I'm tempted to think that the fragmentation of the main, central-peak-like white spot along its edges is real, though the details are rather wiped out by the jpeg artifacts.

Two tongue-in-cheek things that occur to me, looking at the zoomed-in image:

1) The secondary white spots look like a long quonset-style building, with smaller outbuildings arranged around it...

2) The main spot looks like the saucer section of a Constitution-class starship, with the longer piece representing the engineering hull. Not much left of the nacelles, just a few small pieces, so they must have blown apart upon impact...



JUST KIDDING! But, hey, with the jpeg artifacts, you can almost convince yourself that you're seeing a regular structure in the high-albedo parts of the image, just as if they were artificial. And obviously, the scale is all wrong for these things to be anything but natural formations. Gonna be really, really interesting to see these features at higher resolution.

-the other Doug

[stevesliva]

Yeah -- the dark streak appears to be a shadow cast by a ridge of some type, as the sun is coming from the bottom of the image.

If you look at this earlier image, in the craters lower in the image, especially right above the caption, there are dark deposits that really do not appear to be shadows.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=49244

I would not bet that all the low albedo features in the image you're discussing are shadows.

Here, too, there are dark features on the crater slopes that don't seem to all be shadows:

New image, contrast enhanced:[attachment=36067:PIA19566_contrast.jpg]

[Gladstoner]

Here, too, there are dark features on the crater slopes that don't seem to all be shadows:

Indeed. This darkish area (Piazzi) has been noticed since the early Hubble observations.