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Juling Crater

Juling Crater
Juling Crater Dawn took this picture of Juling Crater on Aug. 25, 2016, during its extended mission at an altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers). (Juling is a crop spirit of the Orang Asli in the Malay Peninsula. The word also can mean strabismus or squint in the local language, and the spirit has been called the Squinting Demon. We leave it to you to make the connection with this particular crater apart from the general Ceres naming convention.) The 12-mile (20-kilometer) diameter crater is young, as seen by its sharp features and the absence of many smaller craters inside and nearby. Dawn’s infrared mapping spectrometer spotted the clear signature of ice on the ground in Juling. Ice is not stable for long at this location, so although the crater formed in the recent geological past, the ice must have been exposed even more recently. Scientists have found ice elsewhere as well, and other measurements show that there is a vast amount underground. One of the objectives of the second extended mission orbit was to follow up on the detection of ice in Juling by observing it under different lighting conditions and at different times of the Cerean day. Juling is at 36°S, 169°E on the map below. The next picture partially overlaps with this one, displaying more of the scenery in this area. Full image and caption. NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA