Dramatic New Views of Ceres' Occator Crater

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Dawn’s Latest Orbit Reveals Dramatic New Views of Occator Crater

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NASA’s Dawn spacecraft reached its lowest-ever and final orbit around dwarf planet Ceres on June 6 and has been returning thousands of stunning images and other data.

The flight team maneuvered the spacecraft into an orbit that dives 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the surface of Ceres and viewed Occator Crater, site of the famous bright deposits, and other intriguing regions. In more than three years of orbiting Ceres, Dawn's lowest altitude before this month was 240 miles (385 kilometers), so the data from this current orbit bring the dwarf planet into much sharper focus.

  Read More: NASA

 

[Piney]

The fact that Ceres might have had seas is amazing.....Sodium carbonate..who would of guessed? 

[David Thomson]

The photo seems to suggest that the salt is being produced inside the asteroid in a large volume and is being pushed up through the surface. What process creates salt inside an asteroid?

[Ozfactor]

Would it be the same salt as salt of the earth ? 
 

[paperdyer]

Salt being a fairly generic term, it's anyone's guess if the only info we have are pictures, as great as they are.  I would think it's a high probability, though, to be good old NaCl..

[UFOwatcher]

Hmmm. Wonder if that

[Waspie_Dwarf]

On 7/9/2018 at 4:23 PM, paperdyer said:

Salt being a fairly generic term, it's anyone's guess if the only info we have are pictures, as great as they are.

 

Fortunately we don't have to guess what those salts are as we don't only have the pictures, from the NASA article I linked to:

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And the low-altitude observations obtained with Dawn’s other instruments, a gamma ray and neutron detector and a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, will reveal the composition of Ceres at finer scale, shedding new light on the origin of the materials found across Ceres’ surface.

 

On 7/9/2018 at 4:23 PM, paperdyer said:

 I would think it's a high probability, though, to be good old NaCl..

Not NaCl, also from the NASA article:

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Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer had previously found the bright deposits to be made of sodium carbonate, a material commonly found in evaporite deposits on Earth.