Those look a lot more like data dropouts or something else far more mundane than mini-moons or caves. Let's please not jump right to the most exciting (and improbable) conclusions here.

Is the latest image true 1x1 aspect ratio? It may be my imagination, but Ceres here seems a bit stretched north-south. If I recall, the released February 19 rotation sequence was slightly stretched in such a manner.

After a bit of staring.... The north pole is at mid terminator at the top - FYI.

A thought....

There appears to be a number of broad depressions with soft edges scattered all over the surface that remind me of grabens. For a lack of a better term, I've nicknamed them 'soap dishes'. A few of these are contained within large craters and basins, possibly with associated 'mounds' (horsts?).

Having said that.... In the latest image, a crater with a bright wall appears to be on or near the rim of one of these 'soap dishes' (in the large crater on the left). Is this association coincidence, or could this be a clue to whatever processes produced the bright areas here and elsewhere?

If these 'soap dishes' are grabens, the long rim of one would mark a fault in the crust. Such a fault (fracture zone) could potentially serve as a conduit for material rising from below at any time, even if the graben itself is extremely ancient. The material movement likely would have happened in the distant past as well, though.

Catalogue entries for PIA19336 and PIA19337 have been reassigned to PIA19536 and PIA19537 respectively. Anyone got any idea why? They were listed in Emily's blog: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakda...dawn-ceres.html under their old designations, so I'm giving a heads up in case anyone will want to look for them again.

The feature here:

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May be the same as this:

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RC3 May 4th Rotation
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19547

Well, they're resolved now! But... deposits?...or a snowball that went splat?

Lots of little white spots showing up around the globe--not just next to the "two" big spots in region 5. Little white spots--whatever they are--are common on Ceres.

Wow, there's a lot of stuff to take in in that animation. I note that it looks like the dark area to the east of the brightest stuff is back; which now looks a bit like it is asymmetrically centred on that crater.

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And then of course, those long rifts - or whatever the appropriate terminology is.

Yeah, I give up, I have no clue what the heck double-white-spot is. The closer we get, the weirder it looks!

My version of this new image. The 'rifts' look a lot more like secondary crater chains to me.

Phil

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Looking at them again, that explanation makes sense. They look like rifts/valleys when they are on the right hand side of the frame (like in the image below), and then appear to dissolve/disappear when are on the left, so maybe the rift-like appearance is caused by a deceiving viewing angle.

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Some of those "rifts" look a lot like those on Rhea -- I forget what the current thought is on those, are they thought to be secondaries? (Paul Schenk, are you lurking here?)

The off-center 'dot' now has a constellation of smaller surrounding dots, and the central dot now has two components (see attachment). So along with the dark, asymmetric pattern to the side, I'm inclined to look at this as a very recent strike from a broken object, but this does not align with the purported elevation reports.

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This still looks like exposed ice to me but why the ice should be exposed in this crater and not also in lots of other craters is a mystery if I'm correct. There also seems to be a 'fainter' bright spot below the bright spot at right - the black line in the attached image points at it. This might be ice that's more dirty or ice (partially?) covered by a thin layer of darker material.

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The shapes of the bright spots still look blocky to me, as if not truly resolved. Their diameter, in proportion to the known size of the crater, appears much larger than expected for resolved objects. We were told that the bright spots were unresolved at 2100 meters per pixel, so their expected sizes were less than that. If the bright spots are resolved, then what are their true diameters?

according to Co-I Dr. Tom McCord White spots on Ceres may be salt

If this is an icy body strike, then you still have the coincidental location so close to the centre of a crater unexplained.

Looking at this frame, to me it looks like the brightest part of region 5, the part near the crater centre now resolved into two spots, might be located on the face of a scarp that runs around to the crater rim (arrowed):
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As you follow the animation around, the scarp becomes less visible as the crater approaches the opposite limb, which may be consistent with a topographic feature (ie, scarp) rather than an albedo feature. And the bright spots being located on a slope could explain brightness variations of the spots that have been discussed.

I don't think this could be only due to topography (the difference in brightness is too big when the crater is viewed from above). But some combination of topography and albedo is a possibility and indeed seems likely when looking at the images that show the bright features close to the limb.

Oh well - the blotches turns out to be in every image in today's rotation movie - the two blotches are at the same separation - just moved around depending on the frame. Camera artifact / dirt. There's also a third artifact (dark circle down left of the blue botch). It was fun while it lasted

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This is a heck of a mountain:

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There are many small white spots scattered around the globe that were not resolvable in earlier images. In addition to the newly resolved small white spots in the region 5 crater, there are similar small spots in other craters. For example, if north is up (most likely not) then then there is a small white spot at 12 o'clock in the crater one region 5 crater diameter to the ESE. Just a bit north of 80% of the way east to the terminator, there is a spot in a crater within a crater at 10 o'clock. A little more than 90 degrees west of the region 5 crater is large crater with several small spots and streaks. Whatever these white spots represent, there are examples in several places other than region 5. Lets look beyond just one particularly eye candy crater...

Interesting looking feature extending from the surface.
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According to the flight plan (if I understand it correctly), on May 9th Dawn should have left RC3 and started spiraling down, heading towards Survey Orbit (4400 km above ground, 410 meters/pixel, 3x RC3's resolution and 72x Hubble's resolution). Dawn should reach Survey Orbit on June 6th. Do we have any confirmation of Dawn having departed RC3?

Very roughly 4 km high.

A possible scenario comes to mind....

- In the distant past, fluids rose through the crust (i.e. 'volcanism') in scattered places via fractureres/faults.

- Salty deposits were left behind along the conduits as intrusive deposits, possibly as swarms of mineral veins. The frequency of these may increase with depth. Some of the 'brine' may have erupted onto the surface.

- Subsequent impacts and other erosive processes have cause exposed salts to fade over time and blend in with the surrounding drab surface. Unfortunately, there may be no extrusive deposits remaining (if there ever were any).

- In a few cases, a fortuitously placed impact or landslide could expose some of the deposits. In the case of spot #5, perhaps the central uplift tapped into a particularly large deposit of salt and drew it closer to the surface. The brightest area may be due to (relatively) recent landslides (edit: and/or impacts) on the central peak. Some of the surrounding smaller spots could be more exposures of the same deposit, or landslide debris from the peak.

Edit: For comparison, Phoebe provides some examples of landslide exposures of patchy (relatively) bright material:

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Just another image of the 4? km high mountain.

The area corresponding with Piazzi:

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The dark mottling isn't as obvious here, but there are a few tiny bright spots.

Bright spots: a family portrait:

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Image 3 features the large mountain (bottom spot).

It may soon be time for some underexposed frames that shift the washed out zones into the gray scale for analysis. Given that there seems to be some sensible scale to the size of some of these dots, any detail or sense of relative brightness between them is still washed out.

There's also this feature that looks like a three-pronged mountain:


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It look like volcano

Wow, that is really good! Thanks.

Phil

I'd say its a good candidate for a volcano like feature. If you watch closely to the first few frames, you can see what would appear to be a depression in the top center of the mound.

Added some deconvolution sharpening.

(click to animate)

Very interesting feature and a really cool animation. The mountain apparently has some albedo features but I also get the impression that some of the bright features are at least partially due to illumination geometry changes.

To take stock after the RC3 images. In addition to huge numbers of craters, there appear to be sundry other features, gouges, plateaus, basins rough and smooth and gullies. There are a large number of "polygonal" craters mainly pentagons and hexagons, which should tell those who know about such things something about the composition of the surface layers. There appear to be "stretch marks", which either indicate tectonic activity or are the result of expansion and/or contraction in the past. The numerous bright spots all appear to be of indigenous origin from their shapes, possibly as Gladstoner suggests from seepage of material from below the surface. THE bright spots have the appearance of salt lakes and the odd "spiky" shapes of a couple of other spots suggest they too are the result of fluid deposition. The fascinating mountain is most probably a volcano, since other mountain building scenarios seem in short supply in this area, that is, its not a central peak in a crater or the remains of a crater rim. I just wonder if it is not a giant "Iceberg" that has been thrust up through the surface from below, just to introduce a left field possibility. Different densities and phases of water ice might lead to odd occurrences such as that.

So lots to ponder on still and still we require better resolution. Dawn is due to take a couple of sets of images as it spirals into the next survey orbit, we await further enlightenment.

Speaking of left field ( ) ....

I can't help but be reminded of Middle Butte near Idaho Falls, Idaho:

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When I saw this butte some years ago while traveling through the area, I figured it was a cinder cone (one of several along the Snake River valley). As it turns out, though, Middle Butte formed when a volcanic intrusion pushed up the overlying rocks in a piston-like fashion.

The mountain on Ceres has a roughly similar appearance -- isolated, with (mostly) steep slopes and (an apparently) flat top. Since there is a lack of obvious geologic context here, I figure this is either a volcanic (or 'volcanic') construct or a tectonic uplift. Since it is hard to imagine sustained eruptions producing a 4 km high edifice on Ceres, I'm leaning toward an uplift of some kind.

If this is a tectonic uplift, it may provide a valuable cross section of the upper crust. When I strain my eyes while watching the animations, I think I can just make out a sandwich-like structure in the slopes, i.e. bright-dark-bright. These variations of albedo are probably a combination of outcrops and talus/debris. Since there appears to be some of the high-albedo material present, this could help sort out its nature and origin.

Also, the steepness of the slope on the mountain's north face may be partially due to the impact crater just below it.

I have to agree that this hill is volcano-like in appearance. But if it is due to a geologic process, then why, over geologic time, haven't many others also appeared? Perhaps this one is unusually large and the others are lurking just below the present limit of resolution... more geyser-like in form than built up from durable "ash." What I'm missing so far in the surface is a sense of history of repeating processes (as in Europa's criss-crossing ice ridge sequences).

It's certainly a very interesting-looking feature. It might be related to what was mentioned by a project scientist in a link posted earlier:



If the feature is caused by internal geological processes, there might be more of them. This might be the one that grew the biggest, it might be the youngest one or it might be the one that is the most resistant to erosion.

Well found!

I've performed a rough calculation based on the perspective of this view and I obtain a diameter of the mountain/volcano (from left to right) of 18.52 km.

(16 px / 842 px *974.6 km = 18.52 km.)

Heres another way of viewing the mound in RC3. Centered and rotated the frames to reproject a flyover of the area. The mound appears to be sitting on either highlands or an uplift of some sort. Interesting!

In frame 15 the solar illumination is at a very low angle and the region 5 spots are apparently not overexposed. However, if you carefully align frames 15 and 16 (this involves rotation as well as squashing the minor axis of the crater in frame 16), it looks like the morphology of the brightest part (in the centre of the crater) changes:
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In particular, frame 15 shows the central part clearly resolved into two spots, but in frame 16 it looks like a new bright spot/region has appeared just to the right of the two central spots. If the two spots were simply getting brighter as the sun rose, and hence overexposing and getting larger due to the brightening of the tails of the PSF, then the two central spots in frame 15 should simply get brighter and larger and eventually merge into an elongated shape. Instead, we see what looks like a third central spot/region.

One possibility here is an actual change on the surface, with a new bright region turning on due to solar heating (I think we heard some speculation about this earlier from the team). But perhaps it's more likely that this is simply due to topography: the third central spot is in shadow in frame 15 and in sun in frame 16. We had hints of this in previous releases.

(Like usual, we need to be careful about pixel-scale details, although here we're clearly signal-dominated.)

Could the change in frame 16 just be the result of the CCD sensor becoming saturated? It looks to me that the brightness has increased significantly between frames 15 and 16 and therefore frame 16 no longer resolves the individual points.

Andy

Definitely they get brighter, but they also develop a "bump" off centre, indicated by the intersection of the white lines:
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This is the puzzling thing. Conceivably CCD bleeding could do this, but if it was bleeding there's no sign that the bleeding gets worse (longer) as you'd expect as the spots move further into the sun and brighten considerably.

Made a flyover for 'Spot 5' as well.

(click to animate: 4mb)


Not able to tell but looking at the smaller white areas in this perspective, makes them appear as if they have some sort of volume to them as if they were a plume, especially the upper left one. Did they rule this out yet?

Edit: Looking at this more (I feel mesmerized) the crater floor has been resurfaced at some point as well. There also appears to be some rays around the largest spot, which I thought was maybe ejecta at first, but they appear to come as go with the light. Strange. Whatever these objects are, you can definitely see the suns glint travel across them as the camera follows.

Edit 2 (5-13): For anyone wanting/needing a more focused look at the spot, I cropped and resampled this image.

Do we have any albedo information at this point on the bright spots? I read it was something like 0.12, but that was a long time ago.

The bright spots should be much closer to albedo 1.

I'll admit the new images are perplexing of spot 5. however based on the other white spots I'm still firmly in the impact exposing ice/salty ice hypothesis camp.

In any event I made another movie of the first 6 images as the spot comes into view. I still think we are seeing the side of a crater getting illuminated and the crater reflecting more and more and appearing bigger and bigger.

As for all the new little white spots - who knows - but Ceres is clearly a body dominated by cratering, and this crater is crater upon crater upon crater - so with that in mind - I think I can trace a few old rims and the little white spots might be the edges of some of them. I have a very rough guess at where some of them might be (can't wait for higher res picts!) in the image - the crater lines are probably off - but it show the gist. Now as for why the edges of the craters are white? Maybe the main impact caused shrapnel scraping the tops off or dusting the tops with ice.

Click to animate GIF

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Another mechanism, I could imagine, are landslides (triggered e.g. by physical weathering / thermic cycling) at steep slopes exposing fresh (not yet darkened) material.