Story highlights NASA's Dawn spacecraft delivers new images of the dwarf planet Ceres

Dawn will enter the dwarf planet's orbit in March

(CNN) NASA released new images Monday of the dwarf planet Ceres that hint at crater-like structures on the surface.

The images of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, were taken by the Dawn spacecraft from a distance of 238,000 miles on January 13. With a diameter of about 590 miles, NASA describes the dwarf planet as "Texas-sized."

"We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that," Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, said in a release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took the best images to date of Ceres in 2003 and 2004. While the latest set of images is only at about 80% of Hubble's resolution, NASA expects the decade-old images to be eclipsed when the spacecraft has another imaging opportunity at the end of this month.

Dawn, which was launched in 2007, is expected to enter the dwarf planet's orbit around March 6 for the first time. Scientists have long thought the surface contains vast portions of ice or even an ocean, and have previously detected water vapor

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