NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has traveled roughly 3 billion miles at this point and it’s finally set its sights on the dwarf planet Ceres. Images of Ceres were released back in December, but those images were just for calibration. Dawn’s recently captured pictures are about 27 pixels across, about three times better than what it took last month.
The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has recently discovered that the dwarf planet Ceres has direct evidence of water. Ceres, the largest object in the Asteroid Belt, was detected spouting out plumes of water vapor from two different regions. It’s suggested that this water is possibly coming from volcano-like ice geysers.
Irene W. Pennington Planetarium 