Spaceship approaching dwarf planet Ceres

This video says about itself:

19 January 2015

NASA’s Dawn mission snapped imagery of Ceres at a distance of 238,000 miles (about the same distance between the Earth and the Moon) on Jan. 13th, 2015. The images show ‘hint of craters’ according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

By Jacqueline Howard in the USA:

NASA Probe Gives Close-Up Look At Dwarf Planet Ceres, But What Are Those Weird White Spots?

Posted: 02/06/2015 5:53 pm EST Updated: 02/10/2015 8:59 am EST

What are those things?

Scientists have been puzzling over a set of weird white spots on Ceres ever since 2004, when the spots showed up in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, io9.com reported. Now NASA’s Dawn space probe, which is drawing ever closer to the dwarf planet, has obtained the best images yet of the spots–and still no one can explain them.

“We are at a phase in the mission where the curtain is slowly being pulled back on the nature of the [dwarf planet’s] surface,” Dr. Chris Russell, planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and principal investigator for the $466-million mission, told NBC News. “But the surface is different from that of other planets, and at this stage the increasing resolution presents more mysteries rather than answers them.”

With a diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers), Ceres is the largest object in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Signs of water were detected on Ceres just last year, and some astronomers think the white spots may be ice at the bottoms of craters or subsurface ice that’s been pushed up from under the dwarf planet’s surface.

Scientists hope the Dawn mission will help us understand how Ceres and other large celestial objects formed.

Dawn is expected to arrive at Ceres on March 6, 2015.

Dawn on Ceres: Nasa probe to enter dwarf planet’s orbit. First-ever rendezvous with the largest object in the asteroid belt separating Mars from Jupiter will reveal what Ceres is made of: here.

Mysterious bright spot on dwarf planet Ceres is actually two bright spots: here.

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