Wow, that is a stunning picture. It looks like a bullet hole in a windshield (top pic). What I don't get is if that is water ice why it isn't sublimating off at a huge rate.
I would love to be, in a space craft, right there and be able to say, "Oh hey, that looks really interesting, lets go down and check it out. Sulu, you've got the helm."
They're not sure it's ice yet, and it seems like it's more likely to be something else:
the Dawn science team has not found evidence that is
consistent with ice. The spots' albedo - a measure of
the amount of light reflected - is also lower than
predictions for concentrations of ice at the surface.
Distance from the sun is a huge issue with regards to whether you can have water laying around. From Jupiter's orbit out you often have tons of water on the surfaces of moons with no atmospheres. Where Ceres is it looks like water sublimes but not too quickly, so that patches of ice exposed by collisions last long enough for us to see them.
So the mountain is immediately next to a similarly sized crater. Seems like that would be related though I can't imagine how it would have been formed.
Seriously though, the sides of that peak are pretty clean, so unless there's some atmospheric scrubbing action going on, it'd have to be pretty recent. I'm curious about how it could be formed - I would think that volcanic activity in a low-gravity environment would be ... messier.
