NASA's Dawn spacecraft is at its closest to Ceres and will rendezvous with the dwarf planet early this March.

Dawn is currently taking photos and images of Ceres and NASA just revealed the sharpest and clearest images yet of the dwarf planet.

Dwarf planets are currently defined as half planets. In 2009, the International Astronomical Union made dwarf planets official planets only if they possessed a spherical shape and a size large enough to attract satellites with a strong gravitational force. 

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Ceres possesses all the above characteristics. Ceres is considered the biggest body in the asteroid belt but is still smaller than the Moon. It's comparable to the size of the U.S. state of Texas.

On January 25, Dawn zoomed in for a better and closer look at Ceres. The spacecraft is currently some 147,000 miles away from Ceres but captured images 30 percent sharper compared to Hubble's images that were taken from 150 million miles away.

According to Carol Raymond who is the deputy principal investigator of NASA's Dawn mission, even if the spacecraft is at 147,000 miles away, it captured pivotal details and gathered data essential in the understanding of these bodies that scientists have never seen before.

The dwarf planet also possesses water vapor as it streams jets of water into space, suggesting that it also has solid ice underneath its surface. A mysterious white spot on its surface was also seen in Dawn's latest photos. This surface anomaly will be later explained when the spacecraft reaches the dwarf planet in March.

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