3. i 4. część podsumowania badań planetarnych.
YIR III:
From dwarfs to giants – the missions of Dawn, Juno, and CassiniDecember 24, 2016 by Chris Gebhardt
At the end of June, NASA announced findings that Occator’s bright areas contain the highest concentration of carbonate minerals ever seen outside Earth.
“This is the first time we see this kind of material elsewhere in the solar system in such a large amount,” said Maria Cristina De Sanctis, principal investigator of Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer.
Specifically, the dominant mineral of this bright area is sodium carbonate, a salt found on Earth in hydrothermal environments.
On Ceres, the material appears to have come from inside the dwarf planet, having been lifted to the surface by an impacting asteroid – which suggests that temperatures inside Ceres are warmer than previously believed.
More intriguingly, the results suggest that liquid water may have existed beneath the surface of Ceres in recent geologic time and that the salts could be remnants of an ocean, or localized bodies of water, that reached the surface and then froze millions of years ago.
“The minerals we’ve found at the Occator central bright area require alteration by water,” De Sanctis said. “Carbonates support the idea that Ceres had interior hydrothermal activity, which pushed these materials to the surface within Occator.”
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/12/yir-iii-dwarfs-giants-missions-dawn-juno-cassini/YIR IV:
New Horizons returns all data of Pluto, a small world with big surprisesDecember 27, 2016 by Chris Gebhardt
“Sputnik Planitia is one of Pluto’s crown jewels, and understanding its origin is a puzzle,” said Alan Stern. “Whatever caused it to form, nothing like it exists anywhere else in the solar system. Work to understand it will continue, but whatever that origin is, one thing is for certain – the exploration of Pluto has created new puzzles for 21st century planetary science.”
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/12/yir-iv-new-horizons-pluto-big-surprises/