Emily Lakdawalla • March 3, 2015
NASA held a press briefing on the Dawn mission yesterday, sharing some new images and early interpretations of them. The new images include a total of 27 from the Rotation Characterization 2 sequence that I discussed last week, as well as their first global map made by combining these 27 images in a mosaic. I spent yesterday playing with these photos, trying to decide what to write about them. I see lots of things that intrigue me, and I'm looking forward to Dawn investigating them in more detail.
There are lots of places where crater floors are not the shape I expect. There are lots of subtle linear topographic features that might not be related to craters, but it's hard to say. I'm hesitant to write about these subtly intriguing features, because I feel like I indulged in speculation enough in my previous post on Dawn's photos; it seems premature to try to draw any more conclusions.
So instead of writing another lengthy post interpreting the images, I invite you to check out these photos yourself, and offer you some guidance on things to look for. First, just appreciate the full rotation animation. Take a moment to imagine yourself as Dawn, watching Ceres rotate leisurely below you over the course of its 9-hour day.
NASA / JPL / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Emily Lakdawalla
I have modified the animation above from what was released on the JPL website. An astute observer at unmannedspaceflight.com noticed that the animation had inexplicably been stretched so as to make Ceres' disk appear circular, when in fact Ceres is much wider (975 kilometers) than it is tall (909 kilometers). I have rotated and resized the frames to match the proportions and orientation of this previous Dawn image release, although the match is still not perfect, suggesting that the Dawn camera team performed some additional kind of distortion on these images before releasing them. But the correction has made craters circular that did not appear circular in the official release, notably the crater containing the two bright spots.
With that out of the way, what geographic features pique your interest? Here are some things to think about as you tour Dawn's latest views of Ceres. For all of them, focus on making observations, not inferences. This is one of the first skills I taught my fifth grade science students. Try to describe what you see without trying to explain why it is that way.
And some things to watch out for:
Here's another way of looking at the photos, a montage of all 27 frames from the animation. If you're able to view cross-eyed stereo, look at any side-by-side pair of images and cross your eyes to make it pop out of the screen at you. I see all kinds of interesting topography when I look at these photos cross-eyed!
NASA / JPL / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Emily Lakdawalla
If you can't do cross-eyed stereo, this red-blue anaglyph may work for you. I find that it's just on the edge of being interpretable as 3D -- it makes my brain hurt a bit.
NASA / JPL / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Emily Lakdawalla
Finally, here is one more view of Ceres captured as Dawn began to travel to Ceres' night side, on February 25. Dawn is going to spend some time on the night side of Ceres, as Marc Rayman explains in his recent Dawn Journals from January and February. There should have been images taken on March 1 with only 23% of the disk illuminated. The next set won't be taken until April 10; that will see only 17% of the disk lit, a very thin crescent. Later in April, Dawn will finally get higher-resolution views of a more illuminated Ceres.
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