After arriving at Ceres in March, the Dawn probe is now officially in its closest orbit and is ready to shed new light on our nearest dwarf planet. While it may have arrived in the neighborhood of Ceres more than a month ago, a series of complicated orbital maneuvers boomeranged it into its current orbital arrangement.
Essentially, it first had to enter the gravitational pull of Ceres, before continuing far enough out to whip itself into a return. Currently, it's about 8,400 miles above the surface, but it will first descend to 2,700 miles, then 900, then an ultra-close 230 mile orbit, giving us a startling view of the largest world in the asteroid belt.
Now Dawn can begin its main science mission on Ceres, including determining whether the world might be hiding a subsurface ocean, and what exactly those bright spots seen on the surface are (probably ice or maybe salt.) Although we've known of Ceres since 1801, its small size has made studying it in much detail virtually impossible until now.