Published December 2019
| public
Journal Article
No evidence for true polar wander of Ceres
- Creators
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Keane, James Tuttle
- Ermakov, Anton I.
Abstract
The spins of solar system objects are not constant with time. One way a world's spin can change is by true polar wander (TPW), whereby geological activity perturbs the moments of inertia, reorienting the entire body. Recently, Pasquale Tricarico used data from the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Dawn mission to propose that Ceres experienced a large amount of TPW. Although their analysis is intriguing, we have identified several flaws that remove the central evidence for TPW of Ceres. Constraining the TPW of Ceres is critically important because TPW could have important consequences for Ceres's geomorphology, tectonics and volatile content.
Additional Information
© 2019 Springer Nature Limited. Received 05 November 2018; Accepted 25 October 2019; Published 28 November 2019. A portion of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Data availability: The datasets used in this study are all publicly available. Topography and gravity of Ceres are available on the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) Small Bodies Node (https://sbn.psi.edu/pds/resource/dawn/dwncfcshape.html and https://sbn.psi.edu/pds/resource/dawn/dwncgravL2.html). Topography of Mars, Venus, and the Moon are available on the NASA PDS Geoscience Node (https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/). Topography of the Earth is available from NOAA (https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/). The mapped distribution of Ceres's faults are from ref. 10. Topography of Iapetus is publicly available courtesy of P. Schenk (ref. 8). Author Contributions: J.T.K. and A.I.E. jointly developed this work. J.T.K. was the primary author of the manuscript, created all of the figures, and performed the underlying topographic and tectonic analyses. A.I.E. calculated randomized Ceres topography datasets, and contributed to the manuscript and interpretation of the results. The authors declare no competing interests.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 100154
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20191202-160408557
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
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2019-12-04Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field