I’m pretty late on this, but now that we have a sharper image showing the mysterious white spot (now spots in the plural) on Ceres I can’t help but feeling like we’re in an Arthur C. Clarke novel. The most obvious reference would be 2001, of course, which in the original novel (featuring the Saturn system rather than Jupiter) involved, if I remember correctly, a white spot on Iapetus, which turned out to be the location of one of the ancient extraterrestrial monoliths. It also reminds me of Rendezvous with Rama, one of my favorites (the alien spaceship named Rama was initially mistaken for an asteroid, I believe). And of course the annals of science fiction are filled with ancient spaceships abandoned in various places throughout our solar system (Heechee, anyone?), so I suppose it is just a matter of time before the world governments come to me, asking me to suit up and ship out to investigate the primordial ruins of the space Vikings of Ceres… Fingers crossed anyway.
Update: More detailed images available now. Still just a fuzzy cluster of light bits, but looks a bit more natural now. No crashed spaceship I guess… but who knows! 😛 Would have so much fun writing a story about this, but I haven’t and probably won’t because, well, we will most likely know what’s going on before it would get published anyway. Maybe a poem though…
Vikings, Books, etc. 