[meteorite-list] Ice on Ceres: 'An Interesting Paradox'

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/5851/ice-on-ceres-an-interesting-paradox

Ice on Ceres: 'An Interesting Paradox'
Nola Taylor Redd
Astrobiology Magazine
December 5, 2013

Summary: Indications that ice makes up a third of the mass of Ceres may 
make the dwarf planet the most easily explored icy body -- and NASA's 
Dawn mission is on its way there now.

As NASA's Dawn mission draws closer to its encounter with the dwarf planet 
Ceres in early 2015, excitement continues to mount for scientists looking 
forward to what the satellite might observe. Britney Schmidt, of the George 
Institute of Technology, and Nicole Gugliucci of CosmoQuest, recently 
hosted a Google+ Hangout titled 'Ceres: Great Expectations' to discuss 
the upcoming visit to the nearest dwarf planet in the solar system.

Orbiting in the asteroid belt, a little more than three times as far from 
the Sun as Earth, Ceres is thought to contain an icy mantle that makes 
up approximately a third of its mass.

"Ceres is very different and very exciting in a lot of ways, totally different 
from any place that we've been," Schmidt said in the broadcast. "It may 
be the only primarily icy planet that's out there, at least within reach."

Scratching the surface

Seen through a telescope, Ceres may not appear very exciting. Scientists 
can use the light reflected off of a body to find out information about 
its composition.

"Ceres, to the eye, would appear basically pretty black because it's reflecting 
most colors more or less the same, and reflecting very little light at 
all," said Andy Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics 
Lab.

Even the infrared spectrum, which tends to reveal more information about 
asteroids such as Vesta - Dawn's first stop - provided very little information 
about its composition. By utilizing instruments such as the SpeX instrument 
on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, 
scientists were able to catch hints about the dwarf planet's surface.

These observations revealed suggestions of brucite, hydroxyls, and two 
other features Rivkin says are thought to be due to carbonate minerals.

"[This] makes Ceres one of only a few places where we've found carbonates," 
Rivkin said. "I think other than Earth and Mars, it's Ceres."

He went on to explain that scientists think water interacting with the 
minerals formed the brucite and the carbonates.

"For Ceres, we think it is much more consistent with a body that had a 
lot of water available to interact with."

But water, considered a potential habitat for life to start, can't exist 
on the surface of the dwarf planet in either solid or liquid form.

"We see no real evidence for ice at the surface of Ceres," Rivkin said, 
noting that the dwarf planet is too warm. "However, conditions beneath 
Ceres' surface should allow buried ice to remain there."

At the same time, observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well 
as theoretical data such as the planet's density, suggest that a large 
amount of ice exists.

"That creates this interesting paradox. We think there's a lot of ice 
there, (but) we don't see any at the surface," Rivkin said. "How that's 
going to translate into what we find when we show up there is still very 
much an open question."

Samples sent to Earth

When Dawn arrived at Vesta in mid-2011, scientists already had a head 
start on what the spacecraft might find. That's because debris from the 
asteroid had split off and fallen to Earth in the form of meteorites some 
time ago.

Katie Dyl, of Curtin University in Australia, studies different types 
of meteorites in an effort to understand what the solar system was like 
in its earliest stages.

By comparing the composition of the meteorites in laboratories with asteroids 
in space, scientists are able to locate their sources.

"That's how we learned we have meteorites from Vesta," Dyl said. "People 
like Andy [Rivkin] measured spectra in space, and people like me took 
meteorites from the lab and measured their spectra, and they're exactly 
the same."

But scientists have yet to locate any samples that come from Ceres.

"We can't quite do that with Ceres yet," Dyl said. "That's why it's really 
interesting to actually go there and get a better look."

Rivkin agreed.

"We're pretty sure we don't have meteorites from Ceres itself, so we're 
missing that link that we had for Vesta to be able to put it all together," 
he said. "Dawn is really going into new territory in that sense."

But the spacecraft isn't flying completely blind. Although scientists 
don't have samples from Ceres, they are using other meteorites to garner 
insight into what the dwarf planet might contain.

Two competing theories suggest why carbonates lay on the dwarf planet's 
surface.

The first has to do with the early days of Ceres. Like full-sized planets, 
Ceres was once a collection of dust and gas orbiting the young Sun in 
a pancake-like disk. Gravity drew the different components together, and 
the collection grew into the dwarf planet. (Were it not for the disrupting 
presence of Jupiter, Ceres might have continued growing into a full-scale 
planet.)

During its formation, the ice and rock separated, with the rocky crust 
sinking down through the ice and water. But Ceres lies too close to the 
Sun for ice to remain at its surface, especially near the equator, though 
it may continue to exist at the poles.

"That ice would then start to sublime away, and leave whatever was collected 
in the ice behind," Rivkin said — including the brucites and carbonates 
now seen on the surface.

The other option involves punctures in Ceres’ rocky crust due to impacts 
or natural stresses. Icy lava welling up to the surface would drag brucites 
and carbonates with it. When the ice sublimated, the materials themselves 
would be left behind.

"Hopefully we'll be able to determine which of those two is going on at 
Ceres," Rivkin said.

Dyl echoed his enthusiasm at Dawn's impending arrival.

"I can't wait to be astounded, because it's just kind of how every single 
step we take in space seems to go," she said. "We see something that we 
couldn't have predicted."