Dawn Spacecraft Finds Potential Water Ice Accumulation Areas On Ceres
- 8 years ago
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been hard at work mapping the surface of Ceres and has found that the dwarf planet could be housing accumulations of water ice.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been hard at work mapping the surface of Ceres and has found that the dwarf planet could be housing accumulations of water ice.
The areas believed to have the potential for such deposits are permanently shadowed craters in the northern hemisphere.
Norbert Schorghofer, one of the researchers, said, “Ceres has just enough mass to hold on to water molecules, and the permanently shadowed regions we identified are extremely cold -- colder than most that exist on the moon or Mercury.”
Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, noted, “While cold traps may provide surface deposits of water ice as have been seen at the moon and Mercury, Ceres may have been formed with a relatively greater reservoir of water."
Calculations show that annually 1 in every 1,000 water molecules generated on the dwarf planet could end up in one of these cold traps.
At that rate of accumulation, a thin sheet of ice would take approximately 100,000 years to form.
Scientists believe the cold traps on Ceres have had the requisite temperatures for ice accumulation for roughly a billion years.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been hard at work mapping the surface of Ceres and has found that the dwarf planet could be housing accumulations of water ice.
The areas believed to have the potential for such deposits are permanently shadowed craters in the northern hemisphere.
Norbert Schorghofer, one of the researchers, said, “Ceres has just enough mass to hold on to water molecules, and the permanently shadowed regions we identified are extremely cold -- colder than most that exist on the moon or Mercury.”
Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, noted, “While cold traps may provide surface deposits of water ice as have been seen at the moon and Mercury, Ceres may have been formed with a relatively greater reservoir of water."
Calculations show that annually 1 in every 1,000 water molecules generated on the dwarf planet could end up in one of these cold traps.
At that rate of accumulation, a thin sheet of ice would take approximately 100,000 years to form.
Scientists believe the cold traps on Ceres have had the requisite temperatures for ice accumulation for roughly a billion years.