Mysteries of the Solar System and Beyond

Become a solar system detective and see if you can solve the stellar mysteries in this slideshow before reading how the scientists did it.

Client: NASA JPL Education

The Brief: With Halloween approaching, I created this educational image gallery using real space science mysteries to engage students in STEM. I created the concept and collaborated with JPL scientist Dr. Todd Ratcliff to bring it to life.

Excerpt:

Glowing 'Eyes' on an Alien World

Spotted!

The Dawn spacecraft was two weeks away from entering orbit around Ceres, a previously unexplored world in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

As the spacecraft made its careful approach, capturing images of the cratered and icy world, scientists watched in awe as the dwarf planet came into focus for the first time.

That’s when they saw it up close: a spattering of ghostly bright spots emanating from the surface – and the brightest one, smack dab in the middle of a crater, seeming to stare back at them like a glowing eyeball.

Salty Solution

Over the next year, Dawn dipped closer and closer to Ceres, descending to an altitude of just 240 miles and capturing images one-thousand-times sharper than the first.

The close-ups revealed the brightest spot to be a dome covered in fractures and surrounded by the jagged scar of an impact that had scraped away at the dwarf planet’s surface. Still, scientists wondered, what was it on the fresh surface that made the spot—and others—so reflective?

Once again using spectroscopy to reveal the area’s chemical makeup, scientists discovered that the scar was covered in a glowing film mostly made of salt. The salt, they suspected, was coming from liquid that had risen up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a salt crust.

But where was the liquid coming from? To answer that question, scientists looked at variations in the gravity around Ceres measured by the Dawn spacecraft. That's how they discovered a deep reservoir of brine, or salt-enriched water, oozing up from below and feeding the salty spectacle.