Dawn Finds Evidence for Salty Spots, Morning Mist on Ceres

The largest world in the asteroid belt is sprinkled with bright, enigmatic spots, could have craters that fill with haze each morning, and may even be a transplant from far, far, away, scientists report today in Nature.

These preliminary conclusions are based on data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has been orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres since March. Large, round and watery, Ceres isn’t quite like the rest of the space rocks that live between Mars and Jupiter. And the more scientists learn about the place, the stranger it gets.

“Ceres has been a mystery,” says UCLA’s Christopher Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, noting that there are no pieces of Ceres that have fallen to Earth.

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