Ceres seems to intermittently vent water vapour. Lots of water might make it a particularly human friendly place to visit or live. But then again, if the water boils because of internal radioactivity, maybe not.
We'll soon know more about it:
Also mysterious is why Ceres has a substantially greater abundance of
water than Vesta, an asteroid that orbits the sun at approximately the
same distance, Campins writes in a related News & Views article.
If Vesta and Ceres started out with different amounts of water, that
suggests that the asteroids may have originally formed in different
parts of the solar system. The same sort of cosmic migrations, Campins
notes, could have brought asteroids and comets deep into the solar
system, seeding the Earth with water as well as a variety of organic
chemicals — and thereby playing a considerable role in the origin and
evolution of life.
NASA’s Dawn probe — launched in September 2007 and due to arrive at Ceres early in 2015
— could offer answers to such mysteries. “We don’t really have to
guess: in a year we’ll be there,” says Christopher Russell, a planetary
scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead
investigator for the mission. As well as taking high-resolution images
of Ceres, Dawn’s sensors will help to map various minerals on its
surface.
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