NASA's Dawn spacecraft has delivered more and clearer images of Ceres, but the white spots on the dwarf planet are still a mystery.

According to NBC News, the latest photos were taken from about 90,000 miles away and the strange white spots are still there. Sitting in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres is pelted with several objects, which has left it covered in craters, but the white spots appear to be something else.

"NASA's Dawn spacecraft, on approach to dwarf planet Ceres, has acquired its latest and closest-yet snapshot of this mysterious world," NASA said in a statement. "At a resolution of 8.5 miles (14 kilometers) per pixel, the pictures represent the sharpest images to date of Ceres.

"After the spacecraft arrives and enters into orbit around the dwarf planet, it will study the intriguing world in great detail. Ceres, with a diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), is the largest object in the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter."

Chris Russell, a UCLA planetary scientist serving as the Ceres mission's principal investigator, told NBC News those bright spots are the focus of the project as of now.

"We are at a phase in the mission where the curtain is slowly being pulled back on the nature of the surface," he said. "But the surface is different from that of other planets, and at this stage the increasing resolution presents more mysteries rather than answers them.

"Naively we expect a bright region to be fresh and a dark region to be old. So the surface of Ceres seems to have a number of circular features of varying freshness on a predominantly dark, presumably old surface.

"The one type of feature that clearly came into view this time were examples of central peak craters with overall similarity to large lunar craters."