The largest object in the Main Asteroid Belt besides  Mars and Jupiter is Ceres, an uncommon, proto-planet approximately the size of Texas (590 miles in diameter) that may contain water.  It is larger than Jupiter’s moons and by my understanding almost as larger as Mercury. Scientists have long puzzled about the origin of the odd white spot near it’s the equator. It could be a storm, or a volcano or something else. We’ll soon know a lot more soon about it as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has arrived at Ceres. It’s already captured shots of the planet  and will soon go into a polar orbit at 13,500 km (8,300 miles) in the at the forefront descending to a survey altitude of 4,430 km (2,800 miles). Eventually, it’ll drop as low as 1,480km (950 miles) to gain information and data about it as well as 3D images of it. It seems that the Dawn Probe will stay at CERES when it is done with its investigation mission.

Its first greeting to Ceres will be beamed enliven from the Slooh community observatory starting at 1PM ET today. Unfortunately, Dawn will taking  to fewer photos during this phase than planned due to the failure of some of it navigational controls. Given that it’s already visited Mars and Vesta, other dwarf planet in the region, a few glitches are are believable. Despite the issues, it would amazing to see detailed images like we saw of Vesta. That should further resolved provacative theories as to what the white spots are, which have ranged from ice-gorged craters to cryo-volcanoes. Not to be biased, volcanoes would be interesting. Maybe there is actual water or other liquids on the little planet.

I always wondered if the asteroid belt used to be another large planet like Jupiter that exploded long ago.

Here is a link to a video from USA Today as well–>
http://bcove.me/k44q6jkn