This giant crater on Ceres with bright spots may be the most fascinating place in the solar system
For a few months in 2018, as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft used up its last drops of fuel, it gave scientists an incredibly detailed look at one of the strangest places in the solar system: Occator Crater. That’s the name of a massive impact site on the dwarf planet Ceres, tucked away in the asteroid belt. In the mission’s last months, Dawn flew just 22 miles (35 kilometres) above the dwarf planet’s surface and focused its energies on Occator Crater. Earlier observations from the mission had suggested that some sort of geological activity was bringing saltwater to the surface, and scientists wanted a closer look.
Now, initial analysis of those final months of science suggest that Ceres may have been active much more recently than scientists had dared to imagine, according to an article summarizing seven different research papers published on August 10 in the journals Nature Communications, Nature Geoscience and Nature Astronomy. “Dawn accomplished far more than we hoped when it embarked on its extraordinary extra-terrestrial expedition,” Mission Director Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said in a NASA statement. “These exciting new discoveries from the end of its long and productive mission are a wonderful tribute to this remarkable interplanetary explorer.”
The new research papers focus on a host of different intriguing findings about Occator Crater, which is about 22 million years old and about 57 miles across (92 km), as well as about Ceres more generally. Although Dawn’s final months revolutionized scientists’ view of the dwarf planet and its large crater, the new research doesn’t satisfy curiosity about this ocean world asteroid and may lay the groundwork for a new mission to Ceres, according to an overview paper released with the new findings.