Dawn spacecraft of NASA has been orbiting Ceres for the last few months. The probe has provided many images of the largest object in the asteroid belt. Now, NASA has released new maps of the dwarf planet that highlight bright spots and pyramid-shaped mountain on Ceres.

The new maps have come courtesy of Dawn spacecraft of the United States space agency. The probe has been orbiting Ceres, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, since March this year. The maps have shown compositional and elevation differences across the dwarf planet.

The space agency has been studying images of the dwarf planet sent from Dawn probe. Bright spots of Ceres are mysteries for scientists since their discovery. Now, according to NASA, scientists have found the source of mysterious spots.

The color-coded topographic map listed many approved names for features on Ceres. A giant mountain with 12 mile diameters has been named Ysolo Mons, after an Albanian festival that marks the first day of the eggplant harvest.

Commenting on the new color-coded map of Ceres, Chris Russell, Dawn principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles said, "Ceres continues to amaze, yet puzzle us, as we examine our multitude of images, spectra and now energetic particle bursts."

The brightest spot on Ceres has been named Occator crater. A cone-shaped, 4 mile-high mountain on Ceres has also raised several questions among astronomers.

Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator based at NASA's JPL, Pasadena, California said, "The irregular shapes of craters on Ceres are especially interesting, resembling craters we see on Saturn's icy moon Rhea. They are very different from the bowl-shaped craters on Vesta."

Dawn is currently orbiting Ceres at an altitude of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers), and the spacecraft will image the entire surface of the dwarf planet up to six times in this phase of the mission.

Starting in October and continuing into December, Dawn will descend to its lowest and final orbit, an altitude of 230 miles (375 kilometers). The spacecraft will continue imaging Ceres and taking other data at higher resolutions than ever before at this last orbit. It will remain operational at least through mid-2016.

The $466 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Vesta and Ceres, the asteroid belt's two biggest denizens.

At the conference in Nantes, we might get more clues about what is going on at Ceres as the astronomers from all over the world will ponder upon the data made available by the Dawn Spacecraft.

On Monday, while talking to scientists at the European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes, Chris Russell, principal investigator of Dawn, said, "We believe this is a huge salt deposit. We know it's not ice and we're pretty sure it's salt, but we don't know exactly what salt at the present time".

According to Russell, the presence of salt in the bright spots means the dwarf planet's surface is active. He said that NASA has no idea how the salt gets out onto the surface. Russell also talked about a tall mountain on Ceres that was observed by the space probe Dawn. The mountain is sporting bright streaks along its sides, as per the spacecraft's principal investigator.

"[Salt] tells me that this is an active surface," Russell said. "Some comet or asteroid did not come in carrying salt, this is derived from the interior somehow."