Now that NASA's Dawn spacecraft is swooping in for a closer look at the dwarf planet Ceres, mission managers released a new observation Monday.
According to CNN, Dawn took shots of Ceres from about 238,000 miles away on Jan. 13 and determined the dwarf planet is some 590 miles wide. But the astronomers reviewing the observations also noticed what appear to be craters on Ceres.
The new images are believed to be 80 percent as clear as the ones Hubble took of Ceres in 2003 and 2004, but NASA officials said they expect Dawn to complete the picture with another opportunity in late Jan.
"We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that," Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a press release.
Dawn is expected to continue delivering images over the next few weeks and will enter into Ceres' orbit in early March.
"Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters," Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, said in the release.
In the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and Ceres is the biggest kid in the group. If or when Dawn rendezvouses with Ceres, it would be the first time a spacecraft gets a look that close of a dwarf planet.
"The team is very excited to examine the surface of Ceres in never-before-seen detail," Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, said in the release. "We look forward to the surprises this mysterious world may bring."
