Now That Dawn Is History, Should NASA Send Another Mission to Ceres?

Now That Dawn Is History, Should NASA Send Another Mission to Ceres?

Now That Dawn Is History, Should NASA Send Another Mission to Ceres?







Almost three years since The NASA Dawn mission Arrived at Ceres, the spacecraft has run out of fuel. Is it time to start thinking about sending another mission to the dwarf planet?



	

	The $ 467 million Dawn spacecraft was launched in 2007 on a mission to study the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. After studying the asteroid. Vesta from orbit for about a year, it happened to Ceres, the smallest dwarf planet in the solar system and the largest space rock that orbits the asteroid belt.

		While in orbit at Ceres, Dawn discovered that the dwarf planet has hundreds of strange sports. bright spots, it contains a lot of frozen water and has organic molecules (the basic building blocks for life) on its surface. However, at the end of the mission, scientists still had some important questions about Ceres and what it can teach us about the possibilities of life beyond Earth, questions that could be answered with a follow-up trip to the surface.

The[[Photos: Asteroid Vesta and NASA Dawn Spacecraft] 





						


One of the latest Ceres images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows bright spots in the Occator crater. Dawn captured this view on September 1, 2018, from a height of 2,340 miles (3,370 kilometers) above the surface of the dwarf planet. 

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA 


		"I think the kind of questions we'll be left with will probably require going to the surface, because there's so much that can be said from orbit," Paul Schenk, a participating scientist at the Dawn mission in Space Universities. The Research Association of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston told Space.com.

		Specifically, Schenk said he would like a mission to be sent to explore Occater crater, a crater 57 miles wide (92 kilometers) that contains the largest and brightest place in Ceres. Like the other bright spots on Ceres, the Occator Crater contains salty deposits that were left behind when the water splashed from the subsoil froze and then froze on the surface. This discovery by the Dawn mission revealed that the interior of Ceres is warmer than scientists previously thought. In the case of Occator Crater, a recent impact was probably the source of that heat, Schenk said. 





						


This image of NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows the bright spot in the Occator crater at Ceres. This region is officially known as Cerealia Facula.

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / PSI 


		The most frequent mineral in the Occator crater is sodium carbonate, which is also common in places on Earth that show hydrothermal activity, such as Yellowstone National Park "Where it is known that certain types of bacteria thrive," Schenk said. However, he said that it is "quite improbable" that microbial life exists in Ceres, because the heat generated by the impacts does not last long enough for life to evolve. "The impact generates enough heat to melt the ice and create the groundwater that can then circulate in a central area," he said, but "the heat zone shrinks until the water disappears and freezes" over the course of dozens of thousands A few million years. Here on Earth, the first life forms They emerged 700 million years after the formation of Earth.

		Regardless of whether Ceres is capable of harboring life, a possibility that scientists have not discarded or confirmed at this point, the hydrothermal processes observed on the dwarf planet could help scientists understand similar processes in other bodies of the solar system, such as Jupiter's moon, Europe. or the moon Enceladus of Saturn, two of the main contenders for harboring a possible life beyond Earth. Features that resemble dry Hydrothermal vents on Mars It could also have sustained life at some point in the history of the planet. Like bacteria living in hydrothermal deep-water sources on Earth, organisms that live in similar geological features in another world does not need sunlight to survive. Instead, they would depend on geothermal energy, such as hydrothermal vents and plate tectonics.





						


A full-color image of NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows how the dwarf planet Ceres would resemble the human eye. 

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA 


		In the case of Ceres, being hit with other large space rocks seems to be the source of its geothermal energy. "Hydrothermal reactions with water are clearly taking minerals to the surface," Schenk said. "To understand how this process works on other planets, including Mars, to go back and understand that chemistry and physics, the physical process of what actually happens, how those materials delivered to the surface are produced and what reactions are taking place, are It's going to be important to understand hydrothermal processes throughout the solar system, we have a lot of this information here on Earth, but the chemistry of the Earth's crust is very different from what it is at Ceres. "



		Landing and roaming in Ceres

		Because Occator Crater contains some tantalizing clues about the conditions necessary for life to arise in other worlds, scientists hope to send a lander to further explore the most fascinating feature of Ceres, Schenk said. Ideally, any future mission would involve a small rover like those that landed on the asteroid Ryugu in September.

		"You would have to be able to take some instruments that can provide you with diagnostic information about the composition, so you would have to survive the landing, and you would probably have to be able to move to get to the specific site of interest, because you have to land safely. but then you should go to the area that is interesting, which could be complicated, "Schenk said. (For example, the Japanese mission of Hayabusa2 to Ryugu has had difficulty in finding a safe landing spot on the asteroid surprisingly rocky surface.)

		While Dawn could only study Ceres from orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of 22 miles (35 km), a spacecraft on the surface could learn more about the composition of the dwarf planet by extracting a sample and analyzing it in situ, or within the own spaceship. Dawn used spectrometers to determine which elements are on the surface of the dwarf planet, but those measurements are "dominated by those materials that are spectrally active, those that reveal absorption bands at particular wavelengths," and the carbonaceous materials do not show well. in those measurements, Schenk said. "The carbonaceous materials are often quite soft, so we probably have to go down to the surface to find them." 

		Scientists have been working on preliminary plans for the next Ceres mission since 2008, or seven years before Dawn became the first spacecraft to visit the dwarf planet. A proposed mission called Ceres Polar Lander would send an orbiter combo to Ceres, dropping the lander at its north pole to look for clues about life. The mission would use the same kind of soft landing techniques that NASA has used to spaceship on Mars.

		A team of researchers from the European aerospace manufacturing company Thales Alenia Space and the University of Nantes in France presented the Concept of the Ceres Polar Lander mission. at the European Planetary Science Congress in 2008.

		When the Ceres Polar Lander was first proposed, the scientists thought that the north pole of Ceres would be the most interesting place to study. However, this was long before Dawn discovered the Occator crater, which is now possibly the most interesting place in Ceres.

		Currently, no space agency plans to send another mission to Ceres, but that could change now that the The mission of the dawn is over.. Any proposed NASA mission will have to go through a lengthy review process before they can be selected to go to Ceres, but in the meantime, scientists have a lot of data from Dawn to analyze, Schenk said. "We're just beginning to understand Ceres ... it's going to take a while to figure out what we're really seeing."



	Send an email to Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow it @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and in Facebook. Original article about Space.com.

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