Source: NASA [1]

On Friday morning, NASA's Dawn spacecraft became the first one to ever orbit a dwarf planet. It first launched in 2007 and has since been on a journey of 3.1 billion miles to land on Ceres.

"We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission in a news release [2]. "We have much to do over the next year and a half, but we are now on station with ample reserves, and a robust plan to obtain our science objectives."

Ceres is the largest body in the main asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, according to NASA. It's believed to contain a large amount of craters, ice, and maybe even an ocean. Before a recent set of photos from Dawn were released back in January, the only other images of Ceres had come from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004.

In the January photos, scientists could see a bright white spot but didn't know what it was. "We expected to be surprised; we did not expect to be this puzzled," said Russell in a previous news release. But newer images from February show that what looked to be one spot is actually two bright spots sitting next to each other. "This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations," Russell said.

And thanks to Redditors, we can now see the planet in GIF form [3].

We will have to wait for more images from Dawn to better understand what the white areas are. In the meantime, check out the first (blurry) photos of Ceres taken by Dawn with captions written by NASA.

"These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated."

"This is a raw image, taken Jan. 13, 2015, showing the dwarf planet Ceres as seen from the Dawn spacecraft on its approach."

"This processed image, taken Jan. 13, 2015, shows the dwarf planet Ceres as seen from the Dawn spacecraft. The image hints at craters on the surface of Ceres. Dawn's framing camera took this image at 238,000 miles (383,000 kilometers) from Ceres."

"This is a zoomed-in raw image, taken Jan. 13, 2015, showing the dwarf planet Ceres as seen from the Dawn spacecraft on its approach. Surface features have started to become apparent in the image. Dawn's framing camera took this image at 238,000 miles (383,000 kilometers) from Ceres."