Greetings - this map version has some revisions in the area of the two southern basins to try and show more details.

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Full 4K resolution and polar views are here.

Interesting idea. I was thinking of the ice being quite near the surface everywhere, as at the Mars Phoenix site, and being exposed either by fresh impacts or landsldes on steep slopes, but maybe it's mainly deeper and particular circumstances are required to bring it to the surface.

There is an issue that the dirt overlying the ice may well be denser than the ice. An impact or anything else that disturbs the status quo could trigger some overturning.

scalbers: great map!

It is tricky to discern the orientation of the valleys between the large basin and spot 5, so I took scalber's cylindrical map and brought it into Celestia:

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Some valleys radiate from the basin, but the ones that extend to spot 5 do not. I thought all the valleys were due to the big basin, but something else seem to be in play.

North West and also ENE of white spots 5 are dark lake-shaped regions of uniform darkness (but not black). Are these just image artifacts or something real?

I'm glad to see such helpful good eyes on this forum. The dark area to the NW (shown below) I think you're referring to would be heavily shadowed craters. I'll check to see how easy it is to substitute another image in that area. Where would be the area to the ENE of spot 5? I also still have to catch up with a map that identifies the white spots.

I was still trying to figure out which lake it was shaped like.

Meanwhile, here's the latest image:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19563

Plus a very nice flyover (with slightly exaggerated topography):

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1380

Phil

I ve seen spot 5 in a dream last night.
spot 5 corresponded to a multitude of circular boiling lakes of water.
I became rapidly aware that the fog generated over the lakes exerted a downward pressure that allowed the lakes to remain liquid.
Captivating experience!

Scalbers, those are the "lakes" to the NE. The ones to the ENE are similar and about 1/4 of the way on a line from the top right corner to area 5. Now that my brain is tuned to shadowed craters, I'm sure that is the story for ENE as well.

This might be his real color?


This could be one of the good reasons for central bright spot 5. I hope soon we will know..


Incredible..
many years, long-awaited and imagined..
and is now fully mapped ..
Thanks,

Any color is just an effect of the Celestia rendering. I'm still trying to figure out how to get clean, non-directional lighting on the projected globe.

Yes Ian R, it reminds the white characteristics over Iapetus surface. Thanks,



Many Thanks..


Ok, tonight I try a normal angle impact..


and a low angle impact (it created a crater oblong):




You have reason, was better show exposed fresh ice, subsequently re-covered with dirt.. at that moment I wanted to show craters that had gone more 'in depth, but there are many other possible scenarios for bright spot 5..
Many Thanks


Thanks "antipod",
1. Chariklo is as I have imagined (I have some modified a umbriel moon).
2. It was not a case. I am very fascinated from the small spherical bodies like Mimas or Miranda. I wanted to include just the spherical and small planetary bodies, for paragone at Ceres; for this reason I haven't put irregular bodies like Proteo moon, or Pallas and Iperione. I have included Vesta, a planetary body more 'bigger than others but still uneven, and the others asteroids visited from a Space probes.
One day I try to delete Vesta and I add Proteus moon.. Your advice are welcome, even others, Many Thanks;
in this collage you can see Ceres compared with Tethis, DIone, Ariel, Umbriel:



To my work I use just simply "paint PC program"; I posted them on my exstrasolar planets website since 2012. They have been modified and updated several times over the years, with new images, new data, new dimensions. I am very precise. I do it for passion only.. .
This is a big work that I did some years ago: 126 corp of the Solar system compared 27,8 km/pixel (also the recent ceres RC3 obviously)



I have another work since 2011, 32 exstrasolar system (850 km / pixel), but I know that can't talk about exstrasolar planets in this Forum;
Sorry for my English,
Many THanks,
Daniele

New image:

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19564

Three of the craters may show signs of subsidence in their centers:

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I wonder if the center of spot 5 crater has similar features.

Plus, the crater in the right of the image has scattered bright spots. These are associated with the darkish area known as Piazzi.

Dimmer bright spots in another crater in the latest OpNav 9 image release:

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Edit: a little late to the party

Not quite. I was referring to the big crater that is chopped off on the right edge.

Context of latest image:

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Spot 5 isn't too far away....

I don't know, those look more like doming than subsidence to me. In other words, the features you point to look like positive-relief features, not negative-relief as you would expect from subsidence.

-the other Doug

I think that the feature you point to there is consistent with a small impact crater whose rim erodes outward irregularly by scarp retreat due to mass wasting by sublimation.

I have collapsed domes in mind (central peaks technically are domes.... I think), specifically something resembling a pingo -- sort of. From Wikipedia:

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Perhaps the central rebound drew up ice-rich material from below (icier than the shallower regolith). This ice, now much closer to the surface, melted/sublimed away, causing the overburden to collapse (subside) into the void, leaving pits or other collapse/subsidence structures behind. Maybe in some cases, salts are drawn to the surface during this deicing process.

This is yet another hypothesis that may be shot down when more evidence comes in, but it is fun to speculate.

Funny, DLR posted the same video with DLR watermarks and intro on its own website half a day earlier...
http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.as...#/gallery/19641

At least JPL kept the credits in it

Region 5 is still a mystery from the Survey orbit. For some reason I find that quite amusing.


Another note:

New image of the bright spots on June 6th, from 4400 km!

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images...tml?id=PIA19568

Also in the release is, among other things, a nice mosaic of one of the two big craters in the southern hemisphere. These scratch marks north (?) of it have an interesting appearance:

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With the image darkened a little, it looks as though some internal structure begins to appear in the white spots.....

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Those look like compression artifacts to me. I think the "Spot 5" bright spots are still saturated in the released images.

[Maybe the last few posts should be in a new thread?]

Does anyone know if there are plans to target the white spots with shorter exposures from this second mapping orbit?

Lots of compression artifacts when zoomed in. Below is a 4x view of white spot 5 with very little processing from the original.

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The dark streak to the east and attached to the main bright area, heading southeast, is interesting. I don't think that is a processing artifact.

I have to agree that almost none of the bright area is resolved even in this view. However, it almost looks to me that the main bright area is a mound covered by bright material. But that is certainly more imagination than analysis.

Andy

I'm not a photographic expert, could they try taking photographs at a shorter exposure time in order to maybe resolve some internal structure/features inside the spots?

shouldn't we start a new thread? the latest picture has been taken in the survey orbit

"I'm not a photographic expert, could they try taking photographs at a shorter exposure time in order to maybe resolve some internal structure/features inside the spots?"

I'm sure they have done so. The good images are just not released yet.

Phil

I don't know what the bit depth of the original raw images is, but likely more detail is visible in the bright spots in the original images compared to the press release 8bit/pix images. It's been a while since we've heard if the bright spots are still saturated.


I think the dark streak is a slope directed away from the sun. It looks like it may be part of the boundary of a large collapsed (?) region (arrowed in my image below) inside the main crater.
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If I'm seeing that correctly, it'd be a good guess that the depression has something to do with the bright spots...

Thanks, can't wait for those images.

A comparison of crater floor terrain and albedo:

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Matching up features:

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Yeah -- the dark streak appears to be a shadow cast by a ridge of some type, as the sun is coming from the bottom of the image. In addition, the extreme blow-up, while rife with compression artifacts, does show that the uppermost of the small white spots is also casting a shadow in the proper direction. It's the only one of the white spots that shows a shadow above it, although that might be more because the reflections are saturating the pixels so much that the shadows from the larger spots are being wiped out.

I'm tempted to think that the fragmentation of the main, central-peak-like white spot along its edges is real, though the details are rather wiped out by the jpeg artifacts.

Two tongue-in-cheek things that occur to me, looking at the zoomed-in image:

1) The secondary white spots look like a long quonset-style building, with smaller outbuildings arranged around it...

2) The main spot looks like the saucer section of a Constitution-class starship, with the longer piece representing the engineering hull. Not much left of the nacelles, just a few small pieces, so they must have blown apart upon impact...



JUST KIDDING! But, hey, with the jpeg artifacts, you can almost convince yourself that you're seeing a regular structure in the high-albedo parts of the image, just as if they were artificial. And obviously, the scale is all wrong for these things to be anything but natural formations. Gonna be really, really interesting to see these features at higher resolution.

-the other Doug

Show time : 3 more !

Please link to the original images at the Dawn website, rather than some image hosting site with pop-up ads.

Phil

Yes that feature did catch my eye also, it resembles glacier shearing, and might be a comparatively young feature.

Ceres spot in the parking lot?

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Fracture/conduit? Check.

Salt deposits? Check.

There is even a dark halo, but the origin of this one is quite different.

And is that a giant pair of feet?! Aliens confirmed on Ceres! News at 11!

New image, contrast enhanced:

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If you look at this earlier image, in the craters lower in the image, especially right above the caption, there are dark deposits that really do not appear to be shadows.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/display.cfm?News_ID=49244

I would not bet that all the low albedo features in the image you're discussing are shadows.

Here, too, there are dark features on the crater slopes that don't seem to all be shadows:

Great view of the 'sand dollar' in the upper right there. This is a good orbit from which to capture the whole of the Ceres's biggest features within a frame. Soon we will be too close for that.

Indeed. This darkish area (Piazzi) has been noticed since the early Hubble observations.

Or maybe it's where the underpants gnomes stash their contraband.

This is a section of the floor of the western of the two southern basins, including light and dark markings seen since January. North is at top.
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As mentioned earlier, I suspect both light and dark markings represent volcanic deposits in regions where the crust is weak. That's why light and dark markings are often found on fault lines and in proximity with one another.

My suspicion is that light-toned spots represent salt gradually deposited over a period, and therefore should show varying degrees of positive relief, depending on how long each site was active. I'm yet to see any spots displaying definite signs of impact-related excavation (the consensus explanation in this forum since day 1). The light-toned area left of centre appears to include a ridge on a fault line. If I'm not being fooled by the lightng angle, two thirds of the way along it is a steep cone-shaped mountain. Judging by other large Cererean basins, that mountain looks too small and steep to be its original central peak. The ridge itself could represent a piece of crust that has been broken and tilted prior to formation of the mountain on top.

And I suspect dark markings result from impacts elsewhere, forcing water to explode through those weak points in the crust, spraying and flooding the area with mud -- the basin floor right of centre has clearly ruptured, just where it is darkest. By the way, just at the top of that rupture is a curious mound with two depressions in it that seems to have formed there sometime after the groove it is sitting on.

In the newest release, another crater with a central pit:

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This seems to be a recurring theme.

I'm agreeing a lot with John's points above. Especially where he notes that the darkest albedo unit seems to overlay the area around the cracks on the right of the image. This looks like a classic example of fissure volcanism, where the Cerean equivalent of fire fountains sprayed from the fissures, emplacing the Cerean equivalent of pyroclastic material over the surrounding terrain. Compare this to the black/orange/red/brown volcanic glasses on the Moon that were emplaced by ancient fire fountains. (Look up the orange/red soil and dark mantling found at Apollo's Taurus-Littrow landing site for good examples.)

The thing I wonder about is how ancient are the landforms we're seeing? Except for impact alteration, any volcanism (even cryovolcanism) on Ceres driven by internal heat would have to have shut down gigayears ago. I wonder if Ceres would have looked pretty much exactly as it looks now three billion years ago?

-the other Doug

Are we sure that is an impact crater?

The Piazzi dark feature, and its proximity to the nearby impact structure, reminds me of the dark pyroclastic halo on the southern rim of Mare Orientale (albeit far more diffuse):

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Indeed, yet smaller craters do seem to often have that central peak we've learned to expect. Even in that image there's a few such craters at lower right.
So was that central pit a bright area similar to spot 5 in the past? If that turn out to be correct, the case for ice grow stronger, since a pit would suggest something have been removed/evaporated, salts could remain though leaving the pit bright so have they dusted over or darkened by some other mechanism.....?