As NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets a closer and closer to Ceres, the dwarf planet's mysterious bright spots are not getting any clearer.
Dawn took the most recent images of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, from a distance of 2,700 miles above the surface, according to a press release from NASA' Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
"The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features. For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common. These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly," Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the JPL-based Dawn mission, said in the release.
As Dawn got a better look at Ceres' bright spots, NASA learned there are approximately eight in all, spanning six miles within its crater, which stretches 55 miles across. The new images also revealed a large, mountain-like peak that stands five miles high despite the dwarf planet's mostly flat surface.
"Dawn is the first mission to visit a dwarf planet, and the first to orbit two distinct targets in our solar system. It arrived at Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, on March 6, 2015," read NASA's release. "Dawn will remain in its current altitude until June 30, continuing to take images and spectra of Ceres in orbits of about three days each. It then will move into its next orbit at an altitude of 900 miles (1,450 kilometers), arriving in early August."
