NASA's Dawn Mission Spies Ice Volcanoes on Ceres

Source: SPACE.com

NASA's Dawn Mission Spies Ice Volcanoes on Ceres

"Cryovolcanism" and other curious features mark the dwarf
planet as a surprisingly active and complex world

By Mike Wall, SPACE.com on September 2, 2016

The dwarf planet Ceres is a complex and active world unlike any other place in the solar system, new research suggests.

Observations by NASA's Ceres-orbiting Dawn spacecraft indicate that "ice volcanos" have erupted on the dwarf planet in the recent past and that Ceres' crust is an odd ice-rock mixture that has never been observed before, scientists reported in a series of six new studies published online today (Sept. 1) in the journal Science.

"When we got to Ceres, we were expecting to be surprised, and we have been in many ways," Dawn principal investigator Chris Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Space.com.

"Ceres has been active during its history inside; the interior has been changing, evolving, much like the Earth's interior changes with time," added Russell, lead author of one of the new Science papers and co-author on the other five. "It's in the transition between the smaller asteroids and the Earth, in that it changes, and has changed, over the years from the time that the material initially came together."

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Read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-s-dawn-mission-spies-ice-volcanoes-on-ceres/