Fascinating photos are coming in from Ceres. I always thought of it as a big rock in space, an asteroid like those you see in The Empire Strikes back…but of course it's large enough to pull itself into a spheroid, and Plait makes the point that whether you call it an asteroid or a dwarf planet, it's a *world*.
On March 6, the Dawn spacecraft will ease into orbit around the largest asteroid in the main belt: Ceres.
As it approached Ceres on Feb. 19, Dawn took a series of images creating this amazing animation: