Mystery haze appears above Ceres' bright spots

a reply to: wildespace
There are Dawn Mission scientists who have speculated for quite a while now about the spots being ice, or salts, or whatever. However, these scientists have also made it clear that their speculation at the moment is just that == speculation -- and they understnd they need to get more data before positing an official explanation.

For example, here is Dawn mission scientist Chris Russell's take on it From early March, before they had hardly any data at all:

Studying Dwarf Planet Ceres: Q&A with Dawn Scientist Chris Russell

In this case, the feature is very reflective. There isn't something there signaling us actively. It's signaling us passively; it's reflecting the sunlight. It's consistent with reflecting all of the light if the spot is small enough. Now, we don't know what size it is, so we can't tell if the albedo is 40 percent, 60 percent, 80 percent or 100 percent, but it's probably in that range someplace. One thing that's very good in the solar system at reflecting sunlight is ice. For example, [Saturn's moon] Enceladus has an albedo of about 100 percent.

But there are people who are holding out for salt — not necessarily table salt, but salts of various minerals that may be white in appearance. So we have sort of a dichotomy of opinion in the team as to whether this has a dry or wet explanation. But we'll get to the bottom of this when we can resolve the bottom of the feature.

a reply to: RoScoLaz4

remains a perpetual learning curve.

that's a nice way of putting it...I would call it..."discovering previous BS"

originally posted by: Triton1128


** Personally, I'm sticking with mining colony

But well go with ice for now **

I particularly like this quote from the OP nature.com link.

The phenomenon, observed by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, suggests that the bright spots “could be providing some atmosphere in this particular region of Ceres”, says Christopher Russell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Christopher Russell

The word atmosphere is evocative, much more so than the word gas.

Speculation is of course encouraged.

originally posted by: Triton1128
NASA has detected a HAZE that occasionally forms over half the crater. Due to this discovery, the idea of SALT is pretty much out the window. They are now leaning more towards ICE.

YES!!!! I stand vindicated!

Well sort of... No ice towers.... yet.

originally posted by: wildespace

originally posted by: smurfy
On Cere's they are now dropping the idea of a salty bed for the bright spots, and saying that it is ice

It's not so much about NASA embracing or dropping various explanations for the bright spots, as about speculation and what people read into the official anouncements. NASA are patiently waiting for the spectroscopic data, the rest of us are quite keen on trying to give it more of a certainty.

Saying that "NASA says one thing yesterday, and completely different thing today" is incorrect and will just feed conspiracy theories.

The argument against ice is that that area has been exposed to sunlight for billions of years since Ceres formed, and any exposed ice would have sublimated a long time ago (unless it's very recent). So, the bright spots are either a very recent exposure of ice to the surface, or the much older salt deposits. But this is again just my speculation.

The real answer will come with the real examination of the area by the spacecraft and scientists who receive the data.

^^^^ THIS x 1000

Star for you.

I'm still missing the temperature data.

They are circling Cers since March... where is the data from the VIR?

Visible and infrared spectrometer (VIR) — This instrument is a modification of the visible and infrared thermal-imaging spectrometer used on the Rosetta and Venus Express spacecraft. It also draws its heritage from the Saturn orbiter Cassini's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. The spectrometer's VIR spectral frames are 256 (spatial) × 432 (spectral), and the slit length is 64 mrad. The mapping spectrometer incorporates two channels, both fed by a single grating. A CCD yields frames from 0.25 to 1.0 μm, while an array of HgCdTe photodiodes cooled to about 70K spans the spectrum from 0.95 to 5.0 μm.[2][49]

originally posted by: Triton1128
NASA has detected a HAZE that occasionally forms over half the crater. Due to this discovery, the idea of SALT is pretty much out the window. They are now leaning more towards ICE.

** Personally, I'm sticking with mining colony

But well go with ice for now **

Ceres Haze - Click Here

Link is above. Enjoy ~

Yup Heavy rare metal or element mining Operation! Sure is weird regardless!

a reply to: EartOccupant

I'm still missing the temperature data. They are circling Cers since March... where is the data from the VIR?

And also where is the temp data for 67P, which should be showing signs of warming as it gets closer to the Sun.
How do they measure the surface temperature with spectroscopy? I found this site with some answers.
physics.stackexchange.com...

But with the spectral method, I think they are only really measuring the temperature of the surface to a depth of microns, so the actual temperature of a planet or moon or comet/asteroid can not be really measured, only its surface temperature. You'd need to drill a hole and put a thermometer down it to get a real temperature.

a reply to: GaryN

I think they can gain some idea about under-surface temperature from all those pits opening up as the ice underneath turns from solid to gas.

www.slate.com...
www.esa.int...

Obviously it's an alien terraforming device.

The haze to me looks more like a rare formation of Photoshop Patch Tool, but hey- I'm no scientist

originally posted by: wildespace

originally posted by: smurfy
On Cere's they are now dropping the idea of a salty bed for the bright spots, and saying that it is ice

It's not so much about NASA embracing or dropping various explanations for the bright spots, as about speculation and what people read into the official anouncements. NASA are patiently waiting for the spectroscopic data, the rest of us are quite keen on trying to give it more of a certainty.

Saying that "NASA says one thing yesterday, and completely different thing today" is incorrect and will just feed conspiracy theories.

The argument against ice is that that area has been exposed to sunlight for billions of years since Ceres formed, and any exposed ice would have sublimated a long time ago (unless it's very recent). So, the bright spots are either a very recent exposure of ice to the surface, or the much older salt deposits. But this is again just my speculation.

The real answer will come with the real examination of the area by the spacecraft and scientists who receive the data.

I have this supporting link to add to your thoughts:
www.newscientist.com - Bright spots on Ceres could be water volcanoes...

But a model of Ceres presented at the LPSC has added a wrinkle by suggesting comet-like behaviour is only possible at the poles of the dwarf planet, not the lower-latitude areas where the bright spot has been seen.

Comet jets and cryo-volcanoes

Timothy Titus of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, presented a thermal model that examines where on the surface ice could remain stable over the life time of the solar system, rather than boiling away more quickly. If Ceres is acting like a comet, it must have ice patches that can survive for a long time before being heated by the sun as it moves into a warmer part of its orbit.

Titus found that ice could only be stable in regions above 40 degrees latitude. But the plumes spotted by Herschel seemed to come from nearer the equator, which implies they can’t be comet-like. “The water ice is just not stable at the latitudes that the plumes are supposedly coming from,” Titus says.

We don’t know exactly how deep the ice is on Ceres, so O’Brien tried a range of plausible depths. None produced the conditions for spewing cryovolcanoes – the ice always cracked before enough pressure built up. The best case scenario was water reaching about 90 per cent of the way to the surface.

Intriguingly, that means water could potentially reach the surface from a deep crater, where there was less ice to get through – perhaps even from a crater like the one where Dawn saw the bright spot. That doesn’t mean there is a cryovolcano producing a massive plume, but it could be just enough to replenish the ice on the surface, countering the instability that Titus discovered.

One of hte probelms I've seen, regarding the possiblity of it being a cryvolcano, is there're no apparent cracks or mounds/peaks.

If it's ice, why's it still there, given it's unstable? Is it young somehow? Is it a special mixture--like one of the posters suggested?

Also, I want to add this:
www.newscientist.com - Dwarf planet Ceres might have right stuff for life...

In Dawn’s latest pictures, the bright spot is visible even from the side, meaning it probably protrudes above the crater. “What is amazing is you can see this feature while the rim is very likely in front of the line of sight,” said Andreas Nathues, who is in charge of the mission’s camera. “We believe this could be some kind of outgassing.”

Ok so If I'm reading this right it means either the spot is elevated or the area which the spot is on (near the center of the crater) is elevated. Or maybe it means something else. I just had to post this.

And one last thing. The articles I'm looking at point at sublimation of ice to produce the observed water vapor. So if it were a cryovolcano or geyser, the amounts seen should (probably) be higher.

EDIT: These're not MY thoughts. It's directly from the articles. I wish I was that smart, but I'm not. So also read what I write with caution.
EDIT: Just found a link regarding the quote above about seeing the spot above the rim or at least giving the impression of being elevated:
www.planetary.org - LPSC 2015: First results from Dawn at Ceres: provisional place names and possible plumes...

Then he focused on the bright feature. It is located in the floor of a crater 80 kilometers in diameter. From its behavior as the globe rotates, he said, the bright feature appears to lie in a depression. The images that have been released to the public from the rotation animation do not show all of the photos of the bright feature, so the next point concerns images that I can't show you. "What is amazing," he said, "is that you can see the feature while the rim is still in front of the line of sight. Therefore we believe at the moment that this could be some kind of outgassing. But we need higher resolution data to confirm this." What he is saying is that as Ceres' globe rotates and the 80-kilometer crater's rim rotates into view, that rim should block our ability to see the bright feature on the floor of the crater. However, the bright feature is already visibly bright as the crater begins to rotate into view. Therefore, it must be vertically above the rim of the crater: it must be some kind of plume. "During the day," Nathues went on, "the feature evolves: it brightens. At dusk it gets fainter; at late dusk it disappears completely. We see this for cometary activity."

So it's sublimation then? The bright spots are gaseous in nature?
en.wikipedia.org - Outgassing...

Outgassing (sometimes called offgassing, particularly when in reference to indoor air quality) is the release of a gas that was dissolved, trapped, frozen or absorbed in some material.[1] Outgassing can include sublimation and evaporation which are phase transitions of a substance into a gas, as well as desorption, seepage from cracks or internal volumes and gaseous products of slow chemical reactions. Boiling is generally thought of as a separate phenomenon from outgassing because it consists of a phase transition of a liquid into a vapor made of the same substance.

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov...

they're back!!! with the best photo so far! (still just 4.000km, though.)