Shocking, especially considering that every object with mass has its own gravity (except for Dick Cheney who has gravitas).
“Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.”
I don’t know how common it is for a “planet” to have its own gravity or not. But I’m glad it does. Otherwise I guess any pictures taken of it would have just drifted off into space.
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Actually - perhaps the sentence does make sense. If it didn’t have its own gravity none of the bits and pieces would have stayed together to form an object that one could photograph.
I remember back in the olden days when the media hired people called “editors” who they paid to read articles before they were published to make sure they were accurate or at least that they made sense. Now they just throw articles onto the interweb and have readers beta test them for free.
I can usually figure out what a writer intended to say in a mangled sentence but I honestly have no clue what the writer of this article meant about Ceres having “its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.” Aside from the fact that every object has its own gravity, what does that have to do with the ability to take high resolution photos?
According to a quick search, Ceres gravity is around 1/36 of Earth’s.
So someone with a 2 ft vertical leap on Earth would be able to jump somewhere around 70 ft vertically (is that in Expanse? heh) accounting for air resistance.
Slow motion beer pours as well...
Exciting news about the water, Ceres might well be an important spaceport someday. Everywhere in the solar system will be inhabitable, because all that’s needed is energy and that’s ultimately plentiful.
Elon Musk has been doing some trailblazing, but personally I’m most excited about new propulsion advances and the first large nuclear drive spacecraft. Those will open up the Solar System!