NASA spacecraft nearing mysterious planet

"I'm just delighted that Dawn is now on the doorstep of Ceres," Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division said in a news conference on Monday. Ceres was discovered in 1801 (Pluto wasn't found until 1930) and was the first object found in our solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It's about 310 million miles from Earth and was initially classified as planet, then later demoted to an asteroid, only to be reclassified again as a dwarf planet, CNN reports. The early images from Dawn already have mission scientists excited. "Ceres has really surprised us," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator. "The first images have produced some really puzzling features." One of the puzzles -- two bright white spots that showed up in photographs taken by Dawn in February. "These spots were extremely surprising to the team, and they have been puzzling to the team and to everybody who's seen them." The spots are in a 57-mile wide (92 kilometer) crater. The spot in the center of the crater is about twice as bright as the spot on the side of the crater. Full story