Friday, NASA's Dawn spacecraft became the first space probe in history to ever reach a dwarf planet.

Since it was launched in 2007, Dawn has been accelerating through space and on Friday morning at 9:39 am ET, NASA confirmed that the spacecraft had reached its final: the dwarf planet Ceres.

—NASA's Dawn Mission (@NASA_Dawn) March 6, 2015

"We feel exhilarated," Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the University of California, said in a NASA statement. "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 object in a strip of rocky debris, called the asteroid belt, floating in space between the planets Mars and Jupiter. In fact, it was the first dwarf planet ever discovered back in 1801. At that time, however, it was classified as a planet, and then later as an asteroid. Today, it meets the criteria for a relatively new class of objects called dwarf planets — a classification that includes the much maligned and very loved Pluto.

Dawn is now about 38,000 miles above the surface of Ceres. But over the course of the year it will descend toward the surface, eventually getting closer than the International Space Station is to Earth and snapping pictures of the surface that will be 800 times sharper than what the Hubble Space Telescope could take.

In addition to becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet, Dawn is also the only satellite to orbit two planets during its lifetime. And this amazing achievement is made possible by Dawn's ion propulsion system, which gave the spacecraft enough power to escape the gravitational grip of Vesta when it orbited in 2011, and continue on through space toward Ceres.

As the spacecraft's propulsion system takes it closer to the surface of Ceres, scientists are excited to learn about the planet's composition and find out just what the heck those mysterious white dots, shown in the image above, on its surface could possible be.