Friday, September 16, 2022

 -Michael Zeilnhofer 

The Dawn mission is going to be putting out good data for a while, partly because it covered two divergent targets, Ceres and Vesta, but also because it carried a payload of data heavy equipment, from which a great many observations can be needled out. 

This LPI is an early attempt to categorize the full crater inventory of Ceres. Everything larger than a kilometer is surly an impact, while smaller craters may be ejecta. Therefore an effort to list and map large craters is a must, and here it is. 

  • Check out these beautiful but enigmatic features on the slide at 3:35. 
  • The very next slide at 4:10 shows another odd feature, a polygonal crater, and it's not the only one.
  • Conclusions at 12:40, with a lot of simple charts between. 
Ceres has a few glaring mysteries included such as the geophysics of Ahuna Mons and these salt deposits. Now we are starting to see (because this more a trailhead of investigation than a one-&-done) that there seems to be a difference in regional crust strength on Ceres. Picture discrete patches of Ceres having totally different properties, but you can't see these patches at a glance. The implications are that all ice-worlds have similar traits. 

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