thanks for explanations. interesting btw: regarding the bolded statement, the OP article seems to say "fresh water" not all water on Earth. Which one is correct?
My bad - its fresh water. Ceres is 25% water, which equals 200 million cubic kilometers of fresh water. Earth has 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of total water, 41 million cubic kilometers of fresh water. I've I'd actually thought through the size difference, I hope I wouldn't have made the mistake. Nevertheless, really impressive given the relative scale. Below shows Ceres in between Earth and the Moon to scale. ...followed by Ceres next two moons of Saturn - Encladus -the previously mentioned super reflective moon of Saturn and Dione, one of the larger moons outside of the methane moon Titan, which is humongous relatively speaking - the second biggest moon in the Solar System and larger than Mercury. As well as Pluto, which is the second largest Kuyper belt object known. So Ceres would be a pretty nondescript and average moon if it were orbiting Saturn, and just another rock named after some bizarre god from some obscure culture you've never heard of if it were in the Kuiper belt. But for the asteroid belt, it seems to be special in a couple of respects. If it weren't in the asteroid belt, it would be not particularly special. If you're just bored and want to keep going, here is a humongous and very pretty graphic showing all the major moons of Saturn to size, including Encladus, Dione, Mimas (aka the Death Star), and Titan. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Moons_of_Saturn_2007.jpg Here is a graphic of the objects in the Kuiper belt: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/EightTNOs.png/800px-EightTNOs.png Keep in mind these objects are 40x as far from the Sun as the distance between Earth and the Sun or even further. (Actually, 30-50 AU, so the diameter of the area these things are orbiting around in is 20x as wide as the distance between Earth and the Sun!!!). The distances out there are so large both from the sun, but even between other orbiting objects make trips from Earth to Venus or Mars seem like sending someone to the moon. It is a freaking humongous volume of space. The probe we have sent to Pluto is taking 10 years to get there, and that is nearly as fast as any human object has ever moved. That probe, New Horizons, is moving at 0.00054x the speed of light. :\ Even still, 40 AU to Pluto is nothing compared to 268,136 AU to the nearest star Alpha Centauri. OK, that's my fun for tonight. These distances are so large my mind shuts down and they all just become really, really big.
cool stuff happening today... http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/06/nasa-dawn-spacecraft-approach-ceres/
thx for write up. Regarding the origin of the names of the rocks, who got to name the one called Styx! Also, what's up with "Makemake?" [edit] looked it up. Makemake is a god of Easter Island mythology. creator of humanity. So, does he have a sister called Unmakemake, who killed off all the Easter Island humanity.
Someday, we (humanity - hopefully a lot of them Americans and our friends, assuming nationality still matters) will be out in the Asteroid Belt, exploring, eventually mining, perhaps building colonies and way stations to the outer planets. Having a source of fresh water is vital. My guess is that Ceres will be very important someday for those reasons, and for other reasons in the realm of science fiction now, but quite possibly reality in the future (think Arthur C. Clarke and communication satellites). In my humble opinion, of course. Robotics and advanced AI will be vital, but the human race will be out there, assuming we don't blow ourselves up, or get blown up by a comet or asteroid hitting our planet. Currently, if we spotted such an object on a collision course with Earth, we couldn't do much more than helplessly watch it approach, awaiting our doom
Was hoping for a "just received photos" type presentation...but the discussion was somewhat interesting. Although I think Ottomaton probably could've done a great job presenting too.
New information about Ceres. What an amazing robotic spacecraft. Launched in 2007, it's getting huge amounts of information about an area of the Solar System we know little about (compared to Mars or the moons of Jupiter, for example). Dawn's on-going exploration of Ceres after visiting Vesta, two planetoids in the Asteroid Belt that I find fascinating, continues. From The Atlantic: Sweeping Ceres for the Building Blocks of Life The Dawn spacecraft has detected for the first time evidence of organic compounds on the dwarf planet. Here be organic compounds. By Marina Koren Scientists are discovering more ingredients for life on Ceres. For the first time, researchers have detected organic compounds on the dwarf planet, the second-biggest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The materials contain hints of carbon and ammonia, the chemical components that exist in all known life on Earth. The scientists don’t know exactly what these compounds are, but they say they resemble some tar-like substances that can be found here. The findings, described in a study published Thursday in the journal Science, come from data collected by the Dawn spacecraft, which NASA launched in 2007 to study Ceres and its neighbor inside the asteroid belt, Vesta. Previous observations by Dawn, as well as space telescopes, have shown evidence of water ice, ammonia, salt, and carbonates—all ingredients necessary to create a spark that could, under the right conditions, lead to life. The researchers specifically used data from Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. The instrument sweeps the surface of Ceres for thermal radiation, which can provide information about its chemical composition. The data showed an unusually high concentration of organic material near Ernutet, a 32-mile-wide crater in Ceres’s northern hemisphere. More material was detected scattered in the area near the crater. The researchers believe the compounds originated on Ceres, and did not arrive on the asteroid through a collision with another object, a common delivery method within the solar system. The compounds, they say, wouldn’t have survived the extreme heat of such an impact, and their distribution on Ceres’s surface doesn’t match up with the type that a cosmic accident might produce. It’s important to note that organic compounds can exist where life itself doesn’t. But Ceres is, in other ways, alive. Plumes of water vapor shoot out from underneath the surface when parts of its icy surface melt enough to let them through. The plumes could suggest an internal heat inside the asteroid, left over from its formation 4.6 billion years ago. They could also be evidence of remnants of an ancient ocean. The researchers behind the Science study say internal rumblings could have brought those organic compounds to the surface. The findings build on the growing body of research of what made Ceres, and what makes it tick. Ceres formed alongside the planets about 4.5 billion years ago, as clouds and gas and dust swirled the guts of the solar system into existence. Studying Ceres could provide humans with a better understanding of the origins of life on Earth—and why we haven’t found it elsewhere in the solar system. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/ceres-organic-compounds/516876/
