CrazyNeutrino said:
Scientists Tantalized as Dawn Yields Global Mineral and Topographic Maps of Ceres
Slowly but surely the mysteries of dwarf planet Ceres are being peeled back layer by layer as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbits lower and lower and gathers detailed measurements that have now yielded global mineral and topographic maps, tantalizing researchers with the best resolution ever.
The Dawn science team has been painstakingly stitching together the spectral and imaging products captured from the lowest orbit yet achieved into high resolution global maps of Ceres, released today Sept. 30, by NASA.
more..
What immediately strikes me about this is the radical and symmetrical difference between the equatorial zone and the polar zone. Also, they’re right in saying that the mineralogy of Ceres is much more complicated and subtle than that of Vesta, much more complicated.
The equatorial zone also appears smoother, suggesting that it’s uniformly younger than the poles, a very peculiar result if true. But I’m not sure if that’s just an artifact of the map projection.
PS, the art of using map projections seems to have been completely lost on the past 45 years or so. Even Ptolemy took map projections seriously, way back in 150 AD. Map projections include Mercator, Mollweide, conic with 1 parallel, conic with two parallels, stereographic, orthographic, Gall’s stereographic, equidistant/globular, Sanson’s sinusoidal, polar, Lambert’s azimuthal, Aitoff’s and Bonne’s projection. I’m rather fond of van der Grinten’s projection. (BTW, I just wrote that list without consulting the web). The map projection used by NASA is – none of the above.
