While Pluto deservedly stole the headlines last week, Chris Russell’s Dawn update at the Exploration Science Forum at NASA Ames reminded us that the other dwarf planets are also sharing their secrets with eager scientists. As an eager scientist unaffiliated with the Dawn mission, I’m happy to share what I heard!

Russell’s update began with some relatively mundane results: Ceres’ North Pole is pointing in a different direction than ground-based measurements suggested, leading to slightly different lighting conditions than they were anticipating. Ceres is also a bit smaller than they were expecting, which leads to a slightly larger density. Again, nothing terribly newsworthy.

However, Russell then began to discuss the surface features on Ceres, and things rapidly became much less mundane. He suggested that the distribution of bright spots on Ceres didn’t look like they were consistent with impacts. This was a bit hard to understand, particularly since I was still trying to work through the North Pole results, but I took it to mean that while there were many bright spots across the surface, the relative numbers of large versus small ones don’t look like what we’d expect if they were all simply craters. However, it may also have been a statement about the distribution of these bright spots across the surface in terms of latitude or longitude.