NASA's Dawn mission touched the massive asteroid "1 Ceres" in early 2015. While Ceres is a "dwarf planet", it is also the biggest celestial body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was the first to be found.
So far, though, only ground and space-based telescopes have given us some glimpses of a "dark, possibly water-rich object."
However, now Dawn space probe has given us a huge wealth of information. Amazingly, the latest research has found "unusual minerals, a surface peppered with craters, and water in the form of ice and possibly an outer atmosphere of vapour."
Ceres is the Roman goddess of Agriculture. This seems to be some kind of wishful thinking about Ceres planet harboring life forms!
The speculation that life might exist on the planet is strong. A plume of smoke was seen rising here. "Is Ceres active? Does it have a layer of water or ice below a thin crust of rock? Could it be a ball of mud, overlain by a muddy ocean, on top of which is another thin muddy crust?" are the various questions that pop up.
"When we got to Ceres, we were expecting to be surprised, and we have been in many ways," Dawn principal investigator Chris Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Space.com.
The mission has revealed a "global geological map" that reveals the surface of the planet covered in phyllosilicates, which is a vital group of clay minerals. One kind of clay is shown to be "magnesium-rich" while the second is "ammonium-rich".
As the minerals are widespread, they have been produced by "planet-wide alteration" that indicates the presence of large volumes of water. However, while large quantities of water are not detected, water-ice has been discovered in one crater.
The asteroid surface temperature touches between -93℃ and -33℃, so the water-ice here gets converted into a gas in a low-pressure atmosphere. Hence, some traces of underground ice were also exposed, which explains how the surface got destabilised.
There are speculations that cryovolcanism has created this atmosphere. The subsurface layers of mixed ice and minerals tend to rise up to the surface through various cracks.
Ceres' global geomorphology also shows its surface features, full of impact craters that are not evenly distributed. There seem to be three distinct types of mineral flow in the dwarf planet, with ejected particles following an impact into "ice-rich material."
A number of images from the Hubble Space Telescope also shows that there is a thin exosphere or external atmosphere of water vapor.
The data gathered here has resulted in six new research papers published in the journal Science.
