Aug 26, 2025 05:15 PM
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/n...-habitable
INTRO: When NASA's Dawn mission arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists and the general public got their first detailed look at this strange and beautiful planetoid. As the largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, accounting for more than 39% of its total mass, Ceres is the only object in the Belt that has undergone hydrostatic equilibrium (aka. became round under the influence of its own gravity). The data Dawn obtained between 2015 and 2018, when the mission ran out of fuel, revealed some very interesting things about this mysterious, icy planetoid.
Like Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, scientists have speculated that Ceres could be an "Ocean World," meaning that it could have a liquid water interior that could support life. Dawn's findings indicated that the planetoid is too cold in its interior to prevent water from freezing, and any liquid it contains is likely to be concentrated brines. But according to new research by NASA scientists, Ceres may have had the right conditions to support single-celled lifeforms about 2.5 to 4 billion years ago.
The study was led by Samuel W. Courville, a Planetary and Earth Scientist from the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU), who conducted it while interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was joined by multiple researchers from SESE and JPL, the School of Molecular Sciences at ASU, and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. The paper summarizing their findings was published on August 20th in Science Advances... (MORE - details)
INTRO: When NASA's Dawn mission arrived at Ceres in 2015, scientists and the general public got their first detailed look at this strange and beautiful planetoid. As the largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt, accounting for more than 39% of its total mass, Ceres is the only object in the Belt that has undergone hydrostatic equilibrium (aka. became round under the influence of its own gravity). The data Dawn obtained between 2015 and 2018, when the mission ran out of fuel, revealed some very interesting things about this mysterious, icy planetoid.
Like Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, scientists have speculated that Ceres could be an "Ocean World," meaning that it could have a liquid water interior that could support life. Dawn's findings indicated that the planetoid is too cold in its interior to prevent water from freezing, and any liquid it contains is likely to be concentrated brines. But according to new research by NASA scientists, Ceres may have had the right conditions to support single-celled lifeforms about 2.5 to 4 billion years ago.
The study was led by Samuel W. Courville, a Planetary and Earth Scientist from the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU), who conducted it while interning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was joined by multiple researchers from SESE and JPL, the School of Molecular Sciences at ASU, and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. The paper summarizing their findings was published on August 20th in Science Advances... (MORE - details)