Dawn spacecraft of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reached Ceres this March. Since then, the US space agency has found several things about the largest object in the asteroid belt, but some things, like spots, are still a mystery for scientists. Now NASA is seeking public help to solve mysteries about the dwarf planet.

NASA’s Dawn travelled more than four billion kilometers to reach Ceres and become the first to orbit a dwarf planet. The spacecraft is trying to learn about the structure of Ceres, the object that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, to understand more about the formation of Earth and other planets in the solar system.

Researchers have learned many things about the dwarf planet, but there are still some things that are a mystery. Spots and a protrusion are the things that researchers are trying to understand, but still scratching their heads.

Christopher Russell, principal investigator of NASA’s Dawn mission, said team working on the mission is trying to understand what made Ceres’ mountain, Lonely Mountain. The team has asked public to help understand the mountain and received a number of suggestions from the public, Russell added.

An individual emailed Russell that the mountain on Ceres reminded him a structure of ice that he saw earlier while living in Arkansas. While talking about the ice, Russell said, “These ice structures started just poking out of the ground. Each one of them had a rock or something like that protecting the surface, keeping it cool”.

"We're having difficulty understanding what made that mountain and we have been getting many suggestions from the public," Dawn's principal investigator Christopher Russell told reporters at a space conference in Nantes, western France.

"These ice structures started just poking out (of the ground). Each one of them had a rock or something like that protecting the surface, keeping it cool," Russell said in describing the ice.