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| Among the highest features seen by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Ceres so far is a mountain about 4 miles (6 kilometers) high, which is roughly the elevation of Mount McKinley in Alaska. But how did it form? NASA, for now, has no idea. |
NASA's space probe Dawn, which traveled seven-and-a-half years and some 4.9 billion kilometers (3 billion miles) to reach Ceres in March this year, is the first to orbit a dwarf planet.
The probe is seeking to learn more about the structure of Ceres, which circles the sun between Mars and Jupiter, in a bid to better understand the formation of Earth and other planets.
But many of the features of Ceres have left researchers scratching their heads -- including a 6 kilometer (4 mile) high protrusion they have dubbed "Lonely Mountain".
"We're having difficulty understanding what made that mountain and we have been getting many suggestions from the public," Dawn's principal investigator Christopher Russell told reporters at a space conference in Nantes, western France.
One fan of the probe sent Russell an email saying the mountain reminded him of some ice structures he had seen in the woods years earlier while living in the US state of Arkansas.
"These ice structures started just poking out (of the ground). Each one of them had a rock or something like that protecting the surface, keeping it cool," Russell said in describing the ice.
"Maybe our lonely mountain was some sort of ice construct," the scientist said, adding: "We're taking suggestions like this very seriously."
Russell said "many suggestions" have poured in from the public but did not provide an exact number.
First classified a planet, then an asteroid, then a "dwarf planet" with some traits of a moon -- the more scientists learn about Ceres, the weirder it becomes.
"We have absolutely no idea what that... is due to," Russell said as he pointed to a blue ring on a map of the planet.
Read more at Discovery News
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