It’s hard to do experiments in space.  It costs a boatload of money, takes years of preparation, and even then we can’t get much further than low-Earth orbit. But there is a cheaper alternative to understanding the universe.  We can perform experiments on Earth to simulate what happens far beyond our own planet. That’s just what scientists did at the Vertical Gun Range at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.  They found that Ceres is likely a mish-mash of celestial bodies from several billion years of bombardment. Until March of this year, when the Dawn spacecraft entered orbit of the...