Dawn's Survey Orbit at Ceres |
Dawn's Survey Orbit at Ceres |
Jun 15 2015, 05:47 PM
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#1
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1729 Joined: 3-August 06 From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E Member No.: 1004 |
daily Ceres picture from the survey orbit
http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19572 I started a new topic, as we are no longer in the first orbit phase |
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Jun 22 2015, 10:56 AM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2346 Joined: 7-December 12 Member No.: 6780 |
Thinking at pockets of water:
The core of Ceres is probably still warm by radioactive decay heat of long-lived isotopes. "If" the interior is sufficiently warm sufficiently close to the surface, there might have been or still may exist a subsurface ocean. In this case a large impactor could have penetrated or at least have crushed the maybe 30 km icy surface crust and released some of the liquid of the presumed "mantle" ocean, in some remote analogy to a once suggested origin of the mare on our moon, besides a melt-up by kinetic impact energy. Particularly for a large (say a few km diameter) iron-nickel meteorite it shouldn't be too difficult to penetrate the much less dense crust material of Ceres. |
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