Ceres | The Compost Bin | Forums

Now we find out if it's aliens

The spaceship, trailing a beam of blue-green vapor behind it, looks like something out of Star Wars.

Its destination is also pure Hollywood: a pockmarked world with a frozen subterranean sea and perhaps a few geysers.

But this is no movie. The ship is NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which has scudded smoothly through the solar system for 7-1/2 years on its enormous wing-like solar panels. On Friday at roughly 7:20 a.m. ET, it will slip into orbit around a mini-planet named Ceres, which lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn's job is to tell all about Ceres, which was discovered more than 200 years ago but has let slip very little about itself. Does it have polar ice caps? Does it have a liquid ocean? And could it have once harbored – or could it still harbor -- life?

"We've never even sent a spacecraft there," says Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director. "This is a first reconnaissance of an entirely new world."

The planet has been like "your secretive neighbor. Ceres would tell us nothing," says Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Everything we're seeing was unexpected."

Among the most unexpected sights are the two astonishingly bright spots nestled in a crater on Ceres's surface. Photographed by Dawn's camera Feb. 19, the dots have the experts buzzing with speculation. Maybe a direct hit from an asteroid -- a space rock – excavated some buried ice. Maybe the bright spots are a sheen of minerals deposited by gushing geysers.

The spots "are unique in the solar system," Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator of the Dawn mission said at a NASA briefing Monday. "The mystery will be solved, but it's really got us at the edge of our seats."

http://www.usatoday....../24485279/