NASA stated that although its spacecraft New Horizons has been sending back home some rare images of Pluto, its Dawn spacecraft presented new insights of the dwarf planet Ceres.

The agency said images captured by the probe actually showcase a diverse topography with height differences between crater bottoms and mountain peaks as great as nine miles.

As per astronomers, Ceres is the biggest object in the asteroid belt, having a diameter of 584 miles, which is about 40% the size of Pluto.

Dawn science team member Paul Schenk said, "The craters on Ceres, in terms of their depth and diameter, are very similar to what we see on Dione and Tethys, two icy satellites of Saturn that are about same size and density as Ceres".

It has been said that the International Astronomical Union has started giving official names to some of Ceres' craters. The crater containing the brightest spots was christened Ocator, which has been the source of several months of mystery involving Ceres.

On the other hand, a smaller crater with some bright spots was baptized Haulani. The infrared mapping spectrometer of the Dawn probe showed that this particular crater possesses a cooler temperature compared to its surrounding area.

Ralf Jaumann, a Dawn science team member at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, said, "The impact craters Dantu and Ezinu are extremely deep, while the much larger impact basins Kerwan and Yalode exhibit much shallower depth, indicating increasing ice mobility with crater size and age".