Where are (all) the Photos of Ceres?

It is the brightness that is the curiosity, always has been since it was first spotted. Even as it passes into the terminator it is far brighter than anything else that passes into the terminator, and which has a peak of light.
This is from Carol Raymond,

Dawn's deputy principal investigator, Carol Raymond, described the brightness as "off the charts."

There won't be anything much more specific until Dawn is in a position to capture more information around the end of April.

The 8 possibilities are given as,
Salt flats,
Shiny metals,
Exposed ice,
Water vapour,
Ice volcanoes,
Alien solar collectors,
A spacecraft,
Genetically engineered life-forms.

originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: MysterX

It vanishes once it passes the terminator. Reflection.

Let's say it's a reflection. Most likely it's a pool of some sort at the top of a volcano or mountain inside the crater. As the planet revolved into darkness, the edge of the depression blocks the sunlight from reflecting on the ice/water/whatever.

Let's say it's artificial. It's still inside the depression at the top of the volcano or mountain inside the crater. As the planet revolves into darkness, the edge of the depression blocks our view of the "light."

So your statement is not definitive.

originally posted by: smurfy
It is the brightness that is the curiosity, always has been since it was first spotted. Even as it passes into the terminator it is far brighter than anything else that passes into the terminator, and which has a peak of light.

That's the reason for my curiosity.

Take, for example, a signaling mirror used for emergency rescue. Everyone knows how light reflects off of mirrored surfaces, when the sun is directly on the surface, it shines for miles and is extremely bright. When the sun is not directly on the surface, there's a reflective effect but it's not as intense.

The "light" on Ceres seems to keep the same intensity as it moves across the surface which, to me, would indicate that it's not a normal reflective surface bouncing the sunlight toward Dawn.

I'm not pretending to know WHAT it actually is but I have some pretty strong feelings about what it is not.

Does anyone else find it curious that the name of the spacecraft is "Dawn" which, in addition to the definition: "become evident to the mind; be perceived or understood", also means "the first appearance of light"?

a reply to: Answer

There are different types of reflection. A mirror has a metallic surface and is very efficient at reflecting photons; snow is more diffuse and has a uniform brightness whatever angle you view it from. The crater seems to have a snow floor rather than a metallic (or water ice) one.

a reply to: MysterX

If that shows the light is still there when in the dark side, that will really put a cat among the pigeons.

Thats why they fly by the day side of space objects, so they can see. A flyby of night time is a waste. Black on Black imagery.

And probably why they didn't shoot more images. They got the info they wanted in the limited time they had to resolve it.

A fly by doesn't last long enough to stop and wait for stuff to come around again. Adjusting course is out of the question.

a reply to: smurfy

Exposed ice,

Taken with a camera that has the gain turned up and contrasting the darkness to expose as much detail as possible. Like an infrared camera on earth, weak signals are magnified.

Bright ones are overexposed.

Its a mountain of Platinum. Go get it
!!!

a reply to: intrptr

Does anyone know what the 'camera' is detecting? The navcam is also a star tracker according to the instrument profile.

NavCam Classification: ====================================================================== + Navigation Camera (NavCam) / Autonomous Attitude Star Tracker (STR)

Likely not reflected light at all, but an emission line of hydrogen, so could be looking at an ionisation feature due to dark or glow mode discharge.

a reply to: GaryN

So then a leaking automated fusion reactor placed there long ago by aliens or some such?

Big leak, very dangerous, signs on the door read, keep back.

ETA: Problem with that is the light appears during the flyby… for one.

a reply to: GaryN

Likely not reflected light at all, but an emission line of hydrogen

At what wavelength? 486.1 nanometers? 656.2? Surely you must have some idea or you would not be in a position to say how likely it was.

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: smurfy

Exposed ice,

Taken with a camera that has the gain turned up and contrasting the darkness to expose as much detail as possible. Like an infrared camera on earth, weak signals are magnified.

Bright ones are overexposed.

That's it, like the head of the Dawn science team said, it's off the clock. That's what I was trying to point out in my last post....they don't know yet what it is until they get to a more observable position, which is supposed to be the end of this Month. So we're not there yet!

a reply to: All Seeing Eye

You are assuming that by "observing" it means through an optical lens, but Dawn has a lot of data gathering instruments that are not optical or create pictures, so therefore by observing they don't mean only visual, but by data.
On the side is the optical observing, which is the pictures they show you.

originally posted by: Mianeye
a reply to: All Seeing Eye

You are assuming that by "observing" it means through an optical lens, but Dawn has a lot of data gathering instruments that are not optical or create pictures, so therefore by observing they don't mean only visual, but by data.
On the side is the optical observing, which is the pictures they show you.

It should be noted that pretty pictures are actually the most basic optical data product. Spectrographs also operate in the optical wavelengths and they often tell us WAAAAAAYYYYYYYY more about an object than a pretty picture because they can tell us what it is made out of and also temperature. The polarity of received light can also tell us much.

BTW: For the "alien hunters" out there.....If these were some type of artificial light source we'd know right away by examining the spectra from those spots because artificial light (of all types) has different characteristics than natural reflected or emitted light.

In fact scientists at Harvard began studying ways to do exactly that for objects in our solar system's Kuiper Belt, with an eye towards employing the technique of far future, massive, space-based "hyper telescope" arrays which could directly image planets at significant resolution...




Probes or Scopes?
Top image: My simulation of what the lights of alien cities might look like on an exoplanet around a nearby star as imaged by a massive space based "hyper telescope".

Bottom image: What that same planet would look like from a visiting "fast flyby" interstellar probe from Earth ala Project Daedalus.

From Astronomy Now: Detecting ET’s city lights - Nov 8, 2011

A pair of researchers from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Princeton University have developed a new means by which, in the future and with the requisite telescopic power, it may be possible to detect artificial lights from cities on other planets inhabited by extraterrestrial intelligence. In the meantime, say Professors Abraham Loeb and Edwin Turner, the technique can be put to the test by searching for artificially illuminated objects in our own Kuiper Belt.

The idea of looking for an artificial body in the Kuiper Belt isn’t quite as outlandish as it sounds. In 1950 the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famously posed his extraterrestrial puzzler that subsequently has become know as the Fermi Paradox: if they exist, where are they? Fermi’s rationale was that it would potentially take millions of years to colonise the Galaxy, but that is no time at all compared to the age of the Galaxy. Therefore if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, it should have had plenty of time to have reached Earth long ago. Given that they are not here, that might lead one to think they don’t exist. However, one possible solution (of many) to Fermi’s Paradox is that they have been here, but parked a probe hidden somewhere in our Solar System to keep an eye on us, and the Kuiper Belt has been cited as one possible location.

The Kuiper Belt is a disc of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, extending between 30–50 astronomical units from the Sun (an astronomical unit, AU, is 149.6 million kilometres, which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun). Among its denizens are long period comets and frozen dwarf planets such as Eris and Pluto. Loeb and Turner have calculated that the lights of a city such as Tokyo would appear at a magnitude of +23.7 at a distance of 30AU. This is very faint, but the faintest objects ever seen – distant galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field – were detected at magnitude +31.3 by the Hubble Space Telescope. This is the equivalent of Tokyo being placed at thousands of astronomical units from us, far beyond the Kuiper Belt. Therefore, propose Loeb and Turner, a survey of the Kuiper Belt is definitely within our capabilities.

“Observing a city in the Kuiper Belt, 30AU away, can be done with a modest size telescope and observing time, since this city will be almost a thousand times brighter [than the faintest object seen by Hubble],” Loeb tells Astronomy Now.

Even with Hubble, taking a picture would likely be out of the question, for a typical Kuiper Belt object at that distance would appear as little more than a point source. Instead, Loeb and Turner describe in a paper submitted to the journal Astrobiology that we should instead examine the spectra of Kuiper Belt objects. Artificial light on Earth, be it incandescent sodium lamps or light emitting diodes [LEDs] have different spectral properties to natural starlight (or indeed, the light of natural fires or volcanoes). While the intensity of light from sunlight-illuminated objects drops off inversely with distance to the fourth power, artificial objects would drop off with the inverse square law.

“Since the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects are known to exquisite precision, we can forecast how their distance will change with time and then measure how their corresponding flux changes with time,” says Loeb. “Measuring this light curve is straight-forward, and will allow us to separate those objects that are artificially illuminated.”

Working off the back of existing or future observatories, such as the 8.4-metre Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that it is hoped will be operational by the end of the decade, a search of the Kuiper Belt would not involve any extra financial investment beyond manpower and computer processing time. The chances of finding something in the Kuiper Belt is pretty thin, but if we don’t look we will never know. Moreover, a Kuiper Belt survey would provide a testbed for detecting the lights of alien cities in perhaps a more probable location: exoplanets.

Alien homeworlds
In order to detect lights on exoplanets, we’ll need to build the next generation of giant telescopes, such as the 39.3-metre European Extremely Large Telescope set to be constructed at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Thirty Metre Telescope to be built in Hawaii, or perhaps the 6.4-metre James Webb Space Telescope in orbit. These telescopes will watch for transiting planets and then isolate the light of the planet by subtracting the light of the star by itself (when the planet is hidden in eclipse behind it) from the light of the star and planet combined. This technique has already been used by astronomers to detect the signatures of the likes of hydrogen, oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide in exoplanet atmospheres.

When transiting, the planet’s night side is pointed towards us. Ninety degrees farther around its orbit, we’ll see the planet in its ‘quarter’ phase, with half the visible world in daylight and half in the darkness of night. Consequently, as the planet travels around its star exhibiting different phases, the levels of daylight and artificial light from the night-side would be seen to wax and wane. However, to detect the flux in light from alien cities on the night-side of a planet would require the extraterrestrials to run up an immense electricity bill.

Continued.....

a reply to: MianeyeSo, let me try to understand this.

People at Hubble see a "Light", and now Dawn has confirmed it. So we send a spacecraft 415 million miles, to get a better picture of feature 5. Because that is all they talked about so the main mission was to document feature 5, I assume. And as "Answer" noted "Dawn".

Now NASA and Dawn get to feature 5, and what, only document half the pictures of feature 5? ?? ??? ???? If they had to delete any frames, could they not have deleted the ones that didn't show feature 5????????????

So NASA went 415 million miles, and 7 years, to get half the story. Or was there another "Failure", or "Space Cosmic Rays" getting in the way.?? I could almost believe the lens of the camera had bug splatter on it, but not record feature 5 because, so what is the reason they give?

Dawn has a lot of data gathering instruments that are not optical or create pictures, so therefore by observing they don't mean only visual, but by data.

Oh, I think I understand, Dawn can not multitask, right? Is that the reason?

So, frame photo 1 of the GIF file is the first time they turned the camera on?

Continued excerpt:

“What matters is how much power is associated with the artificial light on the night-side relative to the day-side, and detecting the artificial illumination on planets around other stars requires that the night side will be of comparable luminosity to the day side,” says Loeb. “If the illuminated area is the same in both cases, the luminosity per unit area should be comparable. If the illuminated area is small [for instance, a concentrated region such as a conurbation] its brightness should be higher than the dayside.” In other words, we would have to look for a world with a gargantuan planet-wide city, rather than the pockets of urbanisation on Earth. Such mega-cities may not be feasible, according to Edwin Turner.

“Note they cannot illuminate the night side of their planet to levels comparable to the day-side without roughly doubling the rate at which it is heated by the incoming starlight alone,” he says. “Their global warming issue would dwarf any we might currently have.”

This leads to some interesting consequences. Recently there has been a schism amongst the SETI community regarding whether we should transmit our own messages into space, an activity known as Active SETI. Proponents of Active SETI have countered that because advanced extraterrestrial civilisations would have the technology to see our city lights, they would know we are here and consequently there is little point in continuing to hide our existence. However, according to Loeb and Turner, Earth’s city lights would be far too feeble to see, at least using their method. “The light produced by our civilisation on the night-side of Earth is only a millionth of the solar power impinging on the day-side,” says Loeb. “It will be extra difficult for extra-solar civilisations to see us with similar telescopes.”

The Sun as a lens
Within the next few decades, proposed missions such as NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and ESA’s Darwin mission should be able to image nearby terrestrial planets directly, but there is another route that a more technologically advanced civilisation may take to detect our city lights.

As any cosmologist will tell you, a large mass can bend space-time to such an extent that any light travelling through that patch of space-time becomes magnified, creating a natural telescope. It is by this method that cosmologists probe some of the deepest recesses of the Universe, by studying faraway galaxies that have been ‘gravitationally lensed’ by foreground galaxies or clusters of galaxies. In the same way but on a much smaller scale, our Sun becomes a gravitational lens at a distance of 550AU.

Reaching such a distance from the Sun is currently beyond our capabilities – Voyager 1 is only about 40AU from the Sun after travelling for 35 years. However, a number of scientists, including Dr Claudio Maccone of the International Academy of Astronautics, are exploring the potential for such a mission, nicknamed FOCAL, that could perhaps launch later this century. Using the Sun as a gravitational lens, FOCAL would be able to directly image Earth-like planets, cities and all. “If they [extraterrestrials] are using their own star as a gravitational lens, which is something we might do in the next 100 years, then they can pick up the lights of London,” says the SETI Institute’s Dr Seth Shostak.

The technological and engineering obstacles will be formidable, not just in getting out to 550AU but also in building multiple telescopes to stare at the sky in all directions. “Otherwise a big problem with a solar gravitational lens telescope is that is is very hard and slow to point it at different targets,” says Turner. “To do so, you have to move around by hundreds of astronomical units or more. “That said, if we ever do implement this inventive technique, then it could be used to search for artificial illumination on exoplanets among many other things.”

A gravitational lens telescope is for the future, whereas Loeb and Turner’s proposal is for the here and now and the realities of the economic climate in which we live. “The effort required to realise our proposal is orders of magnitude less expensive than putting a telescope at 550AU,” says Loeb. “The trick, especially in an economic recession, is to find ways to obtain exciting results with limited resources. The science that we propose to do within the Solar System does not require investments of new funds. We should simply do it without a prejudice.”

Equally as great as the detection of a radio signal from ET, finding artificial lights on another planet would be conclusive proof that we are not alone. As Loeb says, “The discovery of an alien city will change our perception of reality.”

That said, the bright spots on Ceres are most likely ice of some sort or another. Ceres is a VERY dark object so ice reflecting sunlight would stand out in high contrast to it.

Of course it's fun to speculate but science is about waiting for data so the regardless of the impatience of some in this thread, the scientists are waiting to analyze better data as Dawn arrives at Ceres.

We won't have to wait much longer.

Ceres is an exciting object and regardless of what the bright spots are, they will tell us something new and fascinating about it.

originally posted by: JadeStar
If these were some type of artificial light source we'd know right away by examining the spectra from those spots because artificial light (of all types) has different characteristics than natural reflected or emitted light.

That's all well and good, assuming "they" aren't using a type of light source of which we are not yet aware.

a reply to: All Seeing Eye

Why are you saying they deleted pictures/frames, the pics are all they got and all they can show, until the next batch of data is collected and send back to Earth, and then you will see more.

They observed Ceres for 9 hours with all instruments on it's full rotation, but only got picture data for ca 7 hours, most likely because of power consumption, or data storage/transmitting limits, or what ever reason there might be.

It's not a 24 hour live video stream.

You are assuming they hide something because you didn't get to see the full rotation in pictures, which they never said they had.

Anyway..bedtime..night

originally posted by: Answer

originally posted by: JadeStar
If these were some type of artificial light source we'd know right away by examining the spectra from those spots because artificial light (of all types) has different characteristics than natural reflected or emitted light.

That's all well and good, assuming "they" aren't using a type of light source of which we are not yet aware.

Or, a natural light source we are not yet aware of

originally posted by: All Seeing Eye

originally posted by: Answer

originally posted by: JadeStar
If these were some type of artificial light source we'd know right away by examining the spectra from those spots because artificial light (of all types) has different characteristics than natural reflected or emitted light.

That's all well and good, assuming "they" aren't using a type of light source of which we are not yet aware.

Or, a natural light source we are not yet aware of

That would be cool as well.

I think that, regardless of what is discovered, it will be a collective "wow, that's pretty cool" moment for everyone. Well, everyone except for the folks who think that any non-alien explanation is a NASA cover up.

a reply to: All Seeing Eye

There are a lot of things Nasa won't tell.