PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 17 (UPI) — NASA’s Dawn probe is quickly approaching its orbital meeting with the dwarf planet Ceres. As the spacecraft careens towards its stopover destination inside the asteroid belt, its instruments are constantly capturing imagery of the mini planet.
On Tuesday, NASA released the latest set of Ceres images — the sharpest yet. They were taken late last week. At the time, Dawn was roughly 52,000 miles from Ceres.
The pics reveal the sphere’s craters and crags in high definition. The dwarf planet’s mysterious bright spots are also beginning to pop out in greater detail.
Dawn is equipped with a variety of instruments that will enable the probe to carry out a number of scientific missions. Researchers are anxious to learn more about the mini planet’s composition and tenuous atmosphere. But mission scientists are most curious about Ceres’ strange mirror-like splotches.
“As we slowly approach the stage, our eyes transfixed on Ceres and her planetary dance, we find she has beguiled us but left us none the wiser,” Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, said in a press release. “We expected to be surprised; we did not expect to be this puzzled.”
Previous observations have shown Ceres to have a significant amount of water, and images have suggested plumes of water vapor are capable of escaping from the dwarf planet’s thick, icy shell. Therefore, some suggest the white shiny spots could be a sort of icy geyser.
But researchers will likely have to wait until Dawn’s rendezvous with Ceres to find out for sure. Dawn will swing into orbit around the dwarf planet on March 6.
The Dawn mission is being managed out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
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