After releasing a virtual tour of the surface of Ceres, a new feature from the dwarf planet has emerged as an intriguing prospect: a mountain.
While the Dawn spacecraft was approaching Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, it spotted strange, distinct bright spots on its surface. Upon close examination of the dwarf planet, mission managers noticed a four-mile high mountain.
NASA revealed the 3-D look at Ceres in a press release Thursday.
"This mountain is among the tallest features we've seen on Ceres to date," Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member and geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, said in the release. "It's unusual that it's not associated with a crater. Why is it sitting in the middle of nowhere? We don't know yet, but we may find out with closer observations."
The mountain appears to have streaks along its sides, which meet at the top in a manner similar to the peak of a pyramid. To compare its height to an Earthly mountain, NASA noted, Mount McKinley also stands about four miles high.
"There are many other features that we are interested in studying further," David O'Brien, a Dawn science team member with the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz., said in the release. "These include a pair of large impact basins called Urvara and Yalode in the southern hemisphere, which have numerous cracks extending away from them, and the large impact basin Kerwan, whose center is just south of the equator."
