Dawn spacecraft of Nasa gets a close-up look of the weird white spot that speckles the dwarf planet Ceres.

 

 

 

A few days ago NASA’s spacecraft Dawn maneuvered to a new orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. This unique orbit is an elliptical path that takes the probe within a mere 21 miles (34 kilometers) of the dwarf planet on nearest approach. That’s more than 10 times closer than Dawn had gotten previously during its three-plus years at Ceres.

What are those weird white spot on the planet?

Observation from the probe has shown that the bright white stuff, which also occurs at several other locations around Ceres, consists of sodium carbonate. According to the scientist, they think that this material was left behind when salty water boiled away into space. However, it still goes a question that where did that water came from?

What do experts say?

 

 

“Acquiring these spectacular pictures has been one of the greatest challenges in Dawn’s extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition, and the results are better than we had ever hoped,” Dawn chief engineer and project manager Marc Rayman, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “Dawn is like a master artist, adding rich details to the otherworldly beauty in its intimate portrait of Ceres.”

“The first views of Ceres obtained by Dawn beckoned us with a single, blinding bright spot,” Dawn principal investigator Carol Raymond, also of JPL, said in the same statement. “Unraveling the nature and history of this fascinating dwarf planet during the course of Dawn’s extended stay at Ceres has been thrilling, and it is especially fitting that Dawn’s last act will provide rich new data sets to test those theories.”

What is the total budget of the mission?

Dawn mission which was launched in September 2007. Was aimed to orbit around Vesta and Ceres, the two biggest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. According to the reports, the budget of the mission was set to $467 million. Dawn orbited Versa from July 2011 to September 2012.

 

 

After then the prob left for Ceres and arrived there in March 2015 becoming the first spacecraft ever to orbit two objects beyond the Earth-moon system.