This is the first spacecraft orbiting such a celestial body.
Dawn is set to begin a 16-month exploration mission around Ceres and during the mission it hopes to break the mysteries and better understand the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
Ceres bright spots pictured by Dawn from 46,000 km (public domain/NASA)SPACEPROBE DAWN was captured by the gravity of CERES at 12.39 GMT, at a distance of 61,000 kilometers from the planet, said Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA.
"After a space journey of 4.9 billion kilometers and 7.5 years, Dawn has reached its new destination," said Marc Rayman, the mission director at JPL.
"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was considered a planet, then an asteroid and now a dwarf planet", one of three of our solar system, including Pluto, he added.
Dawn is first probe exploring closely a dwarf planet, the largest known object in the solar system's asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The latest images sent back by the spacecraft show numerous craters and two points exceptionally bright, close to each other, and that's what scientists could not yet explain so far.
Localized and intermittent water vapor emissions were detected for the first time on Ceres by the powerful European space telescope Herschel between 2012 and 2013.
Before looking at Ceres, Dawn, which weighs 1.21 tons, explored Vesta, one of the largest asteroids of our solar system, around which it orbited for a year starting July 2011.
NASA is now preparing to explore PLUTO, the second largest dwarf planet after ERIS.
NEW HORIZONS PROBE, launched in 2006, continues to approach it before making the nearest pass on July 14. The spacecraft will not be able to get into Pluto's orbit because of the nature of its atmosphere.
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Source: project-ufo.blogspot.com
