Check Out the Sharpest Images of Dwarf Planet Ceres Here! [PHOTOS]

NASA just released high definition images of dwarf planet Ceres captured by the Dawn spacecraft.

Lying between Mars and Jupiter, Dwarf planet Ceres is regarded as the largest, most massive object in the main asteroid belt, with an average diameter roughly similar to that of Texas (584 miles), as reported by BABW News.Launched into space last March 6, 2015, Dawn is the first mission to reach Ceres as well as the first to orbit two distinct extraterrestrial targets. According to The Star, it previously orbited another large asteroid, Vesta, in 2011 and 2012 for a total of 14 months.

NASA reports, as per Bulletin Leader that the Dawn was 1,470 kilometres away from Ceres when it snapped the 140 meters per pixel photo last August 21. The Star furthers that the spacecraft usually takes 11 days to click the photos and transmit them to NASA's base station.

You can view all the high-res photos here.

"Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration," says Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California.

The photos feature a closer look on the surface of Ceres, zooming in on its craters and small mountains.

According to The Star, it will take around two months for Dawn to capture the whole surface of Ceres as each image equal to less than one percent of the planet's total surface. Information gathered will enable the NASA team to create a 3D model of the planet, as per Bulletin Leader. 

"The spacecraft's view is now three times as sharp as in its previous mapping orbit, revealing exciting new details of this intriguing dwarf planet," said NASA's Rayman as reported by The Star.

The Star also reports that with this breakthrough, the engineers and scientists working on Dawn's Ceres mission will be able to study the minerals on the dwarf planet's surface as well as more 'refined' measurements of the planet's gravity field. NASA notes that this will help the mission planners design Dawn's next orbit and its journey there.

Dawn will begin spiraling toward this final orbit in late October, which will be at an altitude of 230 miles (375 kilometers), according to NASA.

Here's additional background info on the Dawn mission from NASA:

Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.