As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft gets closer to the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt, this bizarre body seems to yield more questions than answers.
In its latest video, posted Thursday, NASA shows us that in addition to the intriguing bright spots in a large crater on Ceres, there are also bright streaks running down the sides of a pyramid-shaped mountain rising higher than Alaska’s 20,000-foot (6,100 meter) Mt. McKinley.
Marc Rayman, Dawn mission director, shows us the bright spots at the center and around one edge of a crater that’s 60 miles across and 2 miles deep at the highest level of detail and context we’ve seen so far, but without providing any new insights as to which of the many theories about what’s causing them might be closest to right.
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