NASA's spacecraft Dawn took its first pictures of the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to The Space Reporter. The photos are only nine pixels - even lower resolution than the photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Dawn, which cost $446 million, was launched in 2007 and orbited the protoplanet (large planetary "embryo") Vesta for a year before heading to Ceres. Dawn will enter Ceres' orbit in 2015, according to The Space Reporter.
The image of Ceres was taken from 740,000 miles away - three times the distance from Earth to the Earth's moon. The Dec. 1 image was just a test of Dawn's equipment before arrival at Ceres.
Ceres was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. It was first classified as a planet, but then demoted to asteroid in the mid-19th century, according to The Science Reporter. Once Hubble showed that Ceres is a sphere, all 590-miles in diameter were reclassified as a "dwarf planet."
Although Ceres is an "embryonic planet," its growth is restricted by Jupiter's gravity. The "dwarf planet" is made of rock and ice and is in hydrostatic equilibrium (compressed into a round shape by its own gravitational pull).
"Now, finally, we have a spacecraft on the verge of unveiling this mysterious, alien world," Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman told The Science Reporter. "Soon, it will reveal myriad secrets Ceres has held since the dawn of the solar system."
