Asteroids provide fundamental clues to the formation and evolution of planetesimals. Collisional models based on the depletion of the primordial main belt of asteroids predict 10-15 craters >400 km should have formed on Ceres, the largest object between Mars and Jupiter, over the last 4.55 Gyr. Likewise, an extrapolation from the asteroid Vesta would require at least 6-7 such basins. However, C...

Liquid Water Inside Ceres: The icy dwarf planet Ceres (radius ≈475 km, density 2.1 g.cm−3, semi-major axis 2.8 AU) is the only body besides the Earth and Mars where carbonates have been observed along with brucite, another product of aqueous alteration [1]. Ceres will be visited by the Dawn spacecraft in 2015, which will offer an opportunity to constrain the origin of this large icy body. For e...

Ceres has been explored by NASA/Dawn spacecraft, which allowed for the discovery of the main mineralogical and compositional characteristics of Ceres’ surface. Here, we use mainly data from the Visible and InfraRed imaging spectrometer (VIR) in order to investigate the main spectral characteristics of the quadrangle Ac-H-2 Coniraya, one of the 15 quads in which Ceres’ surface has been divided. ...

The mineralogy and geochemistry of Ceres, as constrained by Dawn’s instruments, are broadly consistent with a carbonaceous chondrite (CM/CI) bulk composition. Differences explainable by Ceres’s more advanced alteration include the formation of Mgrich serpentine and ammoniated clay; a greater proportion of carbonate and lesser organic matter; amounts of magnetite, sulfide, and carbon that could ...

Analysis of Dawn spacecraft Framing Camera image data allows evaluation of the topography and geomorphology of features on the surface of Ceres. The dwarf planet is dominated by numerous craters, but other features are also common. Linear structures include both those associated with impact craters and those that do not appear to have any correlation to an impact event. Abundant lobate flows ar...

Introduction: The dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and is a primary target of NASA’s Dawn mission [1]. Recent modeling has shown that Ceres is likely differentiated and consists of a thin silicate+ice crust underlain by a thicker water ice mantle [2,3]. The presence of hydrated phases on Ceres, as inferred from the 3 μm absorption feature present in surface reflecta...

Cut-elimination is the most prominent form of proof transformation in logic. The elimination of cuts in formal proofs corresponds to the removal of intermediate statements (lemmas) in mathematical proofs. The cut-elimination method CERES (cut-elimination by resolution) works by extracting a set of clauses from a proof with cuts. Any resolution refutation of this set then serves as a skeleton of...

[1] Clouds and the Earth’s radiant energy system (CERES) is a satellite-based remote sensing system designed to monitor the Earth’s radiation budget. In this paper we examine uncertainties in the angular distribution models (ADMs) used by CERES over permanently snow covered surfaces with clear skies. These ADMs are a key part of the CERES data processing algorithms, used to convert the observed...

This study introduces new CERES Angular Distribution Models (ADMs) for estimating shortwave, longwave and window top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes from broadband radiance measurements. By combining CERES measurements with narrowband, high-resolution imager measurements, up to a factor 4 improvement in TOA flux accuracy is achieved compared to TOA flux estimates from previous experiments, such ...