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No evidence for true polar wander of Ceres

Nature Geoscience volume 12, pages 972–974 (2019)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 28 November 2019

The Original Article was published on 08 October 2018

arising from: P. Tricarico Nature Geoscience https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0232-3 (2018)

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 body1. Recently, Pasquale Tricarico used data from the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Dawn mission to propose that Ceres experienced a large amount of TPW2. 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.

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Fig. 1: Searching for palaeo-poles in topography data.

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).

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Acknowledgements

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.

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Author notes

  1. Anton I. Ermakov

    Present address: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    James Tuttle Keane

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Anton I. Ermakov

Authors
  1. James Tuttle Keane
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  2. Anton I. Ermakov
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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.

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Correspondence to James Tuttle Keane.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Primary Handling Editor(s): Stefan Lachowycz.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–10.

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Keane, J.T., Ermakov, A.I. No evidence for true polar wander of Ceres. Nat. Geosci. 12, 972–974 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0495-3

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