NASA released a new image showing the North Pole of Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Unveiled in a news release Thursday, the image is the clearest one of Ceres to date, though NASA said the Dawn spacecraft could snap better ones in the future.

Dawn spent about a month orbiting Ceres on its dark side, not able to get a good look for a quality image. This one was taken April 10 at a distance of about 21,000, but it still only shows the dwarf planet's North Pole in good lighting.

"Subsequent images of Ceres will show surface features at increasingly better resolution," NASA said in its release.

Ceres is the largest object in its asteroid belt with an average diameter of just under 600 miles. Later this month, Dawn will get to within 8,400 miles of Ceres, an orbiting distance it will remain at until May 9, a time when the spacecraft will look to go lower.

Before becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet on March 6, Dawn spent about 14 months in 2011 and 2012 analyzing the giant asteroid Vesta.

"Dawn's goal is to characterize the conditions and processes of its earliest history by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formation," Dawn mission managers at the Jet Propulsion Lab said in a statement. "Ceres and Vesta reside in the main asteroid belt, the extensive region between Mars and Jupiter, along with many other smaller bodies. Each followed a very different evolutionary path, constrained by the diversity of processes that operated during the first few million years of solar system evolution. When Dawn visits Ceres and Vesta, the spacecraft steps us back in solar system time."