What NASA Learned From Bright Spots on Dwarf Planet Ceres

From a distance, the dwarf planet Ceres looks gray and drab, but a newly released photo fromNASA's Dawn mission shows the cosmic mass in color.

The array of colors seen on the surface of Ceres indicates the dwarf planet, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, was likely once fully active.

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"This dwarf planet was not just an inert rock throughout its history. It was active, with processes that resulted in different materials in different regions," Chris Russell, principal investigator for NASA's Dawn mission, said in a statement. "We are beginning to capture that diversity in our color images."