Dawn took a series of now-famous images of Ceres that showed a very bright spot was actually two bright spots inside a crater. The two spots still looked bright as the Ceres crater revolved into the dark side away from sunlight. That's when the web was full of speculation about whether the two bright spots were actually Someone's technological lights!
Then two weeks later, moving forward with its ion propulsion, Dawn was close enough to Ceres to move into orbit at 7:39 AM EST Friday, March 6, 2015, after its 3-billion-mile journey since 2007. People began emailing Earthfiles, “Where are new images of Ceres and those bright spots in the crater?”
So I took that question to Marc Rayman, Director of the Dawn Mission and Chief Engineer for NASA/JPL in Pasadena, California. First, I wondered what his personal reaction was to learning that Dawn had finally reached Ceres, the first spacecraft in human history to orbit the mysterious, spherical, dwarf planet?
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