Dawn at Ceres or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love an Icy Dwarf Planet

After 11 years in space, NASA's Dawn mission to explore the uncharted worlds of the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres has come to an end. Join me in reflection of this overachieving spacecraft’s monumental legacy at Ceres. 

In its last three and a half years at Ceres, Dawn observed anomalous ammonium, vexatious volatiles, wandering water ice, freaky flows, effervescent evaporites, fantastic fractures, and many more peculiarities. In particular, I will discuss the geological mapping of Ceres, its diversity of lobate/fluidized-appearing deposits, and its elastically supported topography. 

Finally, through the use of geophysical modeling, I will discuss the implications of the aforementioned features on the composition and mechanical properties of the inner solar system's only dwarf planet