NASA wants to let the general public take a tour of the Ceres dwarf planet, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Thanks to images compiled to the Dawn spacecraft that has been orbiting it, NASA released a video aimed at giving viewers a 3-D look at the dwarf planet. Of particular interest will be the giant mountain mission scientists dubbed "The Pyramid," as well as the mysterious bright spots.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the video Thursday.
"This mountain is among the tallest features we've seen on Ceres to date," Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member and a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, said in the JPL release. "It's unusual that it's not associated with a crater. Why is it sitting in the middle of nowhere? We don't know yet, but we may find out with closer observations."
Dawn officially became the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet on March 6, 2015 and those bright spots on the surface became a focal point of observation early on.
"The science team is continuing to evaluate the data and discuss theories about these bright spots at Occator," Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at UCLA, said in the release. "We are now comparing the spots with the reflective properties of salt, but we are still puzzled by their source. We look forward to new, higher-resolution data from the mission's next orbital phase."
