Dawn Ceres Arrival: News Briefing
March 2, 2015
Text Version

Image description: A NASA scientist speaks before an audience.

Narration: Of particular interest are the bright spots, which appear mainly in low latitudes and standout against Ceres' dark surface.

Image description: Close up of Ceres showing bright spots among the craters of the planet.

Narration: In the next graphic, we will focus on the two very bright spots. Now, suffice us to say these spots were extremely surprising to the team and they have been puzzling to the team and to everybody who has seen them.

Image description: An image of the round planet is shown with about one-third of it covered in shadow. Two bright spots appear in the center and a few other bright spots appear on the side.

Narration: They show up in a 92 kilometer crater that's about 19 degrees north latitude. The spot in the center is about twice as bright as the spot on the side of the crater, and as yet it has not been resolved. Meaning, it's smaller than the 4 kilometer pixel size, but its apparent brightness is already off scale. It's consistent with highly reflective materials which may contain ice or salts. So, this extreme brightness was really unexpected, but in 2014, it was reported that the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory had detected water vapor around Ceres coming from two longitude sectors. This crater is located in one of those longitude sectors, so it might be related to that water vapor emission.

And it's association with the impact crater may indicate that impact heating resulted in exposure of underlying ice, it's vaporization, and perhaps we are seeing a deposit that was left behind, which is rich in materials like salts.
The team is really, really excited about this feature because it is unique in the solar system and we will be revealing it's true nature as we get closer and closer to the surface. So the mystery will be solved, but it is one that's really got us on the edge of our seats.