NASA spacecraft is finally this close to the edge of the Solar System

Filepic of an artist’s concept of the Dawn spacecraft with Ceres. The craft is bound for a March rendezvous with the dwarf planet, which is thought to be so wet it might even harbour a subsurface ocean.

After voyaging 3.86 billion km through space, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is finally in the home stretch of its journey to Ceres, the largest member of the asteroid belt and one of five dwarf planets in the Solar System.

Dawn was launched in 2007 to study two very different asteroids and learn more about the building blocks of our solar system. Ceres is Dawn’s second stop; its first was Vesta, which the spacecraft circled from July 2011 to September 2012.