American space agency NASA announced that its Dawn spacecraft will be making a closer attempt to study the mysterious bright spots in a crater on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The space agency said these bright spots were first detected by Dawn's instruments during its approach to Ceres. Spotting of these mysterious spots prompted widespread speculations about the presence of ice or salt deposits, volcanic eruptions, icy geysers or impacts that either deposited material of exposed a layer of younger, brighter material below the surface.

The most recent images sent back home the Dawn spacecraft revealed surface features as small as 450 feet across. After seeing the recent images the agency said that the two bright spots now appear to be one very bright area near the center of a crater known as Occator.

Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator, said, “Although our data are now of higher resolution, we're still missing key pieces of information that we really need to know the whole picture”.

He said the most important information that they are missing is the detailed chemistry of the deposits in the dwarf planet. They will not be able to know it until they complete the spectral mapping and have fully analyzed those data, he said.

Once the craft gets closer to the surface they’ll be able to better resolve at the level of these individual deposits and assess whether these bright materials are all the same or are there different flavors of the constituents, he added.