Oxo Crater
Oxo is a small impact crater on the dwarf planet Ceres, located in Ceres' northern hemisphere. It is the second-brightest feature on Ceres. The crater was named after the Candomblé (and Yoruba) god of agriculture. Formation Oxo is a very young crater, having been formed only Ka (thousand years) ago, and it is entirely located within the older, heavily degraded crater Duginavi. Despite its relatively small size, the impact that created Oxo penetrated more deeply into Ceres than many larger craters, reaching a depth of 4,802 metres, and it excavated significant amounts of bright material that was distributed unevenly throughout the crater's ejecta blanket. Physical features As a result of Oxo's young age it has a very sharp crater rim and a well-defined ejecta blanket. It is also home to many large boulders; boulders produced by older craters have largely been destroyed by micrometeoroid impacts. Oxo is actively undergoing the sublimation of water ice, due to its young age. Th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dawn (spacecraft)
''Dawn'' is a retired space probe that was launched by NASA in September 2007 with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt: 4 Vesta, Vesta and Ceres (dwarf planet), Ceres. In the fulfillment of that mission—the ninth in NASA's Discovery Program—''Dawn'' entered orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, and completed a 14-month survey mission before leaving for Ceres in late 2012. It entered orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015. In 2017, NASA announced that the planned nine-year mission would be extended until the probe's hydrazine fuel supply was depleted. On November 1, 2018, NASA announced that ''Dawn'' had depleted its hydrazine, and the mission was ended. The spacecraft is currently in a derelict, but stable, orbit around Ceres. ''Dawn'' is the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, the first spacecraft to visit either Vesta or Ceres, and the first to orbit a dwarf planet. The ''Dawn'' mission was managed by NASA's Jet ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Micrometeoroid
A micrometeoroid is a tiny meteoroid: a small particle of rock in space, usually weighing less than a gram. A micrometeorite is such a particle that survives passage through Earth's atmosphere and reaches Earth's surface. The term "micrometeoroid" was officially deprecated by the IAU in 2017, as redundant to meteoroid. Origins and orbits Micrometeoroids are very small pieces of rock or metal broken off from larger chunks of rock and debris often dating back to the birth of the Solar System. Micrometeoroids are extremely common in space. Tiny particles are a major contributor to space weathering processes. When they hit the surface of the Moon, or any airless body ( Mercury, the asteroids, etc.), the resulting melting and vaporization causes darkening and other optical changes in the regolith. Micrometeoroids have less stable orbits than meteoroids, due to their greater surface area to mass ratio. Micrometeoroids that fall to Earth can provide information on millimeter scale ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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IOP Publishing
IOP Publishing (previously Institute of Physics Publishing) is the publishing company of the Institute of Physics. It provides publications through which scientific research is distributed worldwide, including journals, community websites, magazines, conference proceedings and books. The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. Any financial surplus earned by IOP Publishing goes to support physics through the activities of the Institute. The main IOP Publishing headquarters is located in Bristol, England, and the North American headquarters is in Philadelphia, United States. It also has regional offices in, Mexico City, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sydney. It employs over 400 staff. It was the first physics publisher to publish a journal on the internet. In 1994, the journal ''Classical and Quantum Gravity'' was published as a TeX file. In January 1996 the organization launched the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Astronomical Journal
''The Astronomical Journal'' (often abbreviated ''AJ'' in scientific papers and references) is a peer-reviewed monthly scientific journal owned by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and currently published by IOP Publishing. It is one of the premier journals for astronomy in the world. Until 2008, the journal was published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the AAS. The reasons for the change to the IOP were given by the society as the desire of the University of Chicago Press to revise its financial arrangement and their plans to change from the particular software that had been developed in-house. The other two publications of the society, the ''Astrophysical Journal'' and its supplement series, followed in January 2009. The journal was established in 1849 by Benjamin A. Gould. It ceased publication in 1861 due to the American Civil War, but resumed in 1885. Between 1909 and 1941 the journal was edited in Albany, New York. In 1941, editor Benjamin Boss arrange ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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American Geophysical Union
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists and enthusiasts that according to their website includes 130,000 people (not members). AGU's activities are focused on the organization and dissemination of scientific information in the interdisciplinary and international fields within the Earth and space sciences. The geophysical sciences involve four fundamental areas: atmospheric and ocean sciences; solid-Earth sciences; hydrologic sciences; and space sciences. The organization's headquarters is located on Florida Avenue in Washington, D.C. History The AGU was established in December 1919 by the National Research Council (NRC) to represent the United States in the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), and its first chairman was William Bowie of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (USCGS). For more than 50 years, it operated as an unincorporated affili ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Planets
A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a young protostar orbited by a protoplanetary disk. Planets grow in this disk by the gradual accumulation of material driven by gravity, a process called accretion. The Solar System has at least eight planets: the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets each rotate around an axis tilted with respect to its orbital pole. All of them possess an atmosphere, although that of Mercury is tenuous, and some share such features as ice caps, seasons, volcanism, hurricanes, tectonics, and even hydrology. Apart from Venus and Mars, the Solar System planets generate magnetic fields, and all except Venus and Mercury have natural satellites. The giant planets bear planetary ri ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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List Of Geological Features On Ceres
Ceres is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The IAU has adopted two themes for naming surface features on Ceres: agricultural deities for craters and agricultural festivals for everything else. As of 2020, the IAU has approved names for 151 geological features on Ceres: craters, montes, catenae, rupēs, plana, tholi, planitiae, fossae and sulci. In July 2018, NASA released a comparison of physical features found on Ceres with similar ones present on Earth. ''Piazzi'', named after Giuseppe Piazzi, the discoverer of Ceres, is a dark region southwest of Dantu crater in ground-based images that was named before ''Dawn'' arrived at Ceres. Overview of features Catenae Craters Ceres is saturated with impact crater An impact crater is a circular depression in the surface of a solid astronomical object formed by the hypervelocity impact of a smaller object. In contrast to volcanic craters, which result from explosion ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sublimation (phase Transition)
Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas state, without passing through the liquid state. Sublimation is an endothermic process that occurs at temperatures and pressures below a substance's triple point in its phase diagram, which corresponds to the lowest pressure at which the substance can exist as a liquid. The reverse process of sublimation is deposition or desublimation, in which a substance passes directly from a gas to a solid phase. Sublimation has also been used as a generic term to describe a solid-to-gas transition (sublimation) followed by a gas-to-solid transition ( deposition). While vaporization from liquid to gas occurs as evaporation from the surface if it occurs below the boiling point of the liquid, and as boiling with formation of bubbles in the interior of the liquid if it occurs at the boiling point, there is no such distinction for the solid-to-gas transition which always occurs as sublimation from the surface. At ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Boulders
In geology, a boulder (or rarely bowlder) is a rock fragment with size greater than in diameter. Smaller pieces are called cobbles and pebbles. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive. In common usage, a boulder is too large for a person to move. Smaller boulders are usually just called rocks or stones. The word ''boulder'' derives from ''boulder stone'', from the Middle English ''bulderston'' or Swedish ''bullersten''. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved December 9, 2011, from Dictionary.com website. In places covered by s during s, su ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ceres (dwarf Planet)
Ceres (; minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first asteroid discovered, on 1 January 1801, by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily and announced as a new planet. Ceres was later classified as an asteroid and then a dwarf planetthe only one always inside Neptune's orbit. Ceres's small size means that even at its brightest, it is too dim to be seen by the naked eye, except under extremely dark skies. Its apparent magnitude ranges from 6.7 to 9.3, peaking at opposition (when it is closest to Earth) once every 15- to 16-month synodic period. As a result, its surface features are barely visible even with the most powerful telescopes, and little was known about it until the robotic NASA spacecraft ''Dawn'' approached Ceres for its orbital mission in 2015. ''Dawn'' found Ceres's surface to be a mixture of water ice, and hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clay. Gra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ejecta Blanket
An ejecta blanket is a generally symmetrical apron of ejecta that surrounds an impact crater; it is layered thickly at the crater's rim and thin to discontinuous at the blanket's outer edge. The impact cratering is one of the basic surface formation mechanisms of the solar system bodies (including the Earth) and the formation and emplacement of ejecta blankets are the fundamental characteristics associated with impact cratering event. The ejecta materials are considered as the transported materials beyond the transient cavity formed during impact cratering regardless of the state of the target materials. Formation A blanket of ejecta is formed during the formation of meteor impact cratering and is composed usually of the materials of that are ejected from the cratering process. Ejecta materials are deposited on the preexisting layer of target materials and therefore it form an inverted stratigraphy than the underlying bedrock. In some cases, the excavated fragment of ejects ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bright Spots On Ceres
Several bright surface features (also known as faculae) were discovered on the dwarf planet Ceres by the ''Dawn'' spacecraft in 2015. The brightest cluster of spots ("Spot 5") is located in an crater called Occator. The largest and brightest component of the cluster is in the center of the crater, with dimmer spots located towards this crater's eastern rim. Early in the orbital phase of the ''Dawn'' mission, the high albedo of these spots was speculated to be due to some kind of outgassing, and subsequent closer images helped scientists determine that it is a material with a high level of reflection, and suggested ice and salt as possibilities. These bright features have an albedo of about 40%, four times brighter than the average of Ceres's surface. On 9 December 2015, scientists reported that the bright spots on Ceres may be related to a type of salt, particularly a form of brine containing hydrated magnesium sulfate (MgSO4·6H2O); the spots were also found to be associat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |