
Dawn’s Latest Orbit Reveals Dramatic New Views of Occator Crater - rbanffy
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/dawn-s-latest-orbit-reveals-dramatic-new-views-of-occator-crater
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Latteland
It's fantastic to see the continuing discovery of more than "dead cold rocks"
out in the solar system. I'm still feeling stunned about Pluto a year later.
Ceres looks interesting (shiny sodium carbonate, and it's apparently not
aliens :-)), and it still feels like an ion drive is a sci fi idea, instead it
is real.

As someone with not much planetary science exposure, what is the explanation
why these other smaller bodies in the solar system like Ceres seem to have
more interesting variation and more carbon, possible volatiles, than the moon?

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_verandaguy
>I'm still feeling stunned about Pluto a year later

Unless there's been some new developments, New Horizons had its Pluto flyby
three years ago :)

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BurningFrog
Still less than a Pluto year.

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twic
I wish they would put scale bars on these photos :(.

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MaxLeiter
I'm not familiar enough with the math to figure it out, but the footnote for
the image mentions the photo is from 21 miles above, and wikipedia [1] reports
the cameras focal length is 150mm. Is it possible to calculate the relative
scale with that?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_\(spacecraft\))

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perilunar
You can calculate the field of view from the focal length, but you need to
also know the film/sensor size.

However the Wiki article you linked to said the FOV of the framing camera is
5.5° x 5.5°.

So at 21 miles, the photos would be about (5.5°/360° ⋅ 2𝛑 ⋅ 21 miles) = 2.0
miles across.

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MaxLeiter
That’s 2 miles across each, right? The image in the blog is a montage of
images, so now to figure that out...

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dvh
How could deposits like that happen? There doesn't seem to be source, they
just leech to the surface.

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geuis
Likely material from inside leaking out. Some hypotheses are that Ceres has
internal water and remaining heat and that was the source.

