The above picture shows a false-color images of one of the bright spots noticed on the asteroid Ceres by the Dawn spacecraft. Ceres sports several of these splotches, and until just recently scientists had no good guesses as to what they were made of.
Now they believe after studying a bit more data gathered from Dawn that the splotches are deposits of hexahydrite, a form of magnesium sulfate. That's a salt, which might make you wonder if NASA was going to get a mission together to send an astronaut to Ceres to throw some over his or her shoulder and avoid some truly cosmic bad luck. But since "salt" is a catchall name for a kind of molecule that forms when an acid and a base meet on equal terms and just kind of chill out, we may be spared that necessity since hexahydrite is not table salt.
On the other hand, magnesium sulfate is what we commonly refer to as Epsom salts, which makes you wonder what kind of being has feet big enough it needs a whole asteroid sprinkled with the stuff to have around to soak them. Maybe that avoiding-bad-luck space mission would be a good idea after all.
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