covering the week's top tech stories
with a slight linux bias the results of
a major exploration mission
showed monday that the dwarf planet
serra's
long believed to be a barren space rock
is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea
water beneath its surface
maria castine christina de santiff from
the national institute for astrophysics
in italy says of the discovery i'm
extremely excited to find some evidence
of liquid water
together with the fact that this body
has a lot of minerals very interesting
for the formation
of life it's a good combination of
chemical compounds that help in forming
biological molecules
de sancti and her colleagues analyzed
high-resolution images in sarah's
of seras taken by the dawn spacecraft
which orbited the dwarf planet between
2015
and 2018 before it ran out of fuel
in his final phase the spacecraft
orbited just 35 kilometers above the
surface
of sures focusing on the occupator
crater
she and her team were able to identify
salt by comparing data
including images and spectral analysis
from the dawn spacecraft with equivalent
analysis of chemicals here on earth
earlier observations of bright deposits
on the crater had hinted at the presence
of salty water underneath
but the discovery of hydrated sodium
chloride provides much stronger evidence
of an underground
ocean impact fractures on the surface of
the aquitar crater analyzed in a
separate study
suggests the ocean is some 40 kilometers
below the surface
although the exact size is unknown it's
pretty large says the snakti
adding that the present such a large
body will certainly have
influenced the geology of sores with
water coming up from below the surface
and bringing minerals with it ralph
jaumen of the free
university of berlin in germany says the
mineralogy
is unique and so far not observed on
other solar system bodies
drawmen says these findings demonstrate
that even small bodies like sores could
have water
in their interior
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