Ceres has pyramid mountain, more bright spots: NASA
This NASA image, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft and released on June 22, 2015 shows an intriguing mountain on dwarf planet Ceres protruding from a relatively smooth area. (AFP photo)
Newly-released photos by NASA show a colossal “pyramid-shaped” structure and more mysterious bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres.
The new images, which were released on Monday, have been captured by the Dawn spacecraft and are the clearest photos ever taken from this asteroid in our solar system.
The new images clearly “reveal a pyramid-shaped peak towering over a relatively flat landscape… a mountain with steep slopes protruding from a relatively smooth area of the dwarf planet's surface. The structure rises about 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface,” NASA said in an article published on its website on Monday.
Ceres has been known to have some large mysterious bright spots in its craters, but in the new images “at least eight spots can be seen next to the largest bright area,” which is believed to be roughly nine kilometers (six miles) wide and an extremely reflective material, such as ice and salt, is thought to be responsible for their brightness, though scientists are considering other probabilities too.
“The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common.
These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly," said Carol Raymond, the deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Ceres, which is the largest object within the asteroid belt in our solar system with a diameter of approximately 963 kilometers (598 miles), follows an orbit between Mars and Jupiter with a period of 4.6 Earth years.
The second-most massive dwarf planet in the asteroid belt is Vesta with a mean diameter of 525 kilometer (326 mile) that completes its orbit in 3.6 Earth years.
Artist's rendering of Dawn with Vesta (L) and Ceres (R) (Wikipedia)
The Dawn space probe, launched by NASA in 2007 with a mission to study these two asteroids, entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011 and left it in late 2012. It started orbiting Ceres on March 6, 2015 and is supposed to remain there till the conclusion of its mission.