APOD: 2020 September 1 - Salt Water Remnants on Ceres

Good morning, Rallypoint. Today's Astronomy PIcture of the Day (APOD) is titled "Salt Water Remnants on Ceres." Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that does not dominate its region of space (as a true or classical planet does) and is not a satellite. Ceres was the first member of the asteroid belt to be discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801, and was visited by the NASA spacecraft Dawn in 2015.

Imagery from Dawn captured numerous bright spots on the surface of Ceres. Spectral analysis of these spots suggest they are highly-reflective salt water deposits. Seeing as how the spots occur in areas of obvious meteor impacts, scientists now theorize that those impacts melted portions of a subsurface brine reservoir. As this salty water emerged from cracks in the surface caused by the meteor strike, the water vaporized (leaving the salt deposits).

Why is this important? A subsurface supply of salty water would have been an ideal environment for the initial chemical interactions that support life as we know it. This short video clip (0:06) is a flyover of the Occator Crater on Ceres. The salt deposits are shaded pink.