Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. However, very little is known about the dwarf planet. The name Ceres comes from the Roman goddess of of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships but doesn’t quite live up to that name. It is about 590 miles in diameter and primarily made of rock and ice.

“We know so much about the solar system and yet so little about dwarf planet Ceres. Now, Dawn is ready to change that,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer and mission director, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in a statement.

The best images of Ceres to date were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 and 2004 but Ceres is expected to surpass the resolution of those images by the end of January. Those images will begin to answer questions about the dwarf planet including whether or not it’s hiding a liquid ocean beneath its icy surface.

“Already, the [latest] images hint at first surface structures such as craters,” said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany.

Ceres isn’t as famous as other objects in the solar system, such as the dwarf planet Pluto, however it’s history among astronomers goes back a long way. The gap between Mars and Jupiter was originally noticed by Johannes Kepler in 1596 and it was first suggested by Johann Elert Bode that an undiscovered planet might exist in that region in 1772.

Ceres was finally discovered in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, founder of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo. Piazza, at that time, had no way of knowing what he had actually found and referred to it as a “star”. Even at that time though he had his doubts.

“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public,” wrote Piazzi in a letter to astronomer Barnaba Oriani.

More than two centuries later our astronomical technology and knowledge of the solar system have advanced considerably but Ceres remains something of a mystery.

“The team is very excited to examine the surface of Ceres in never-before-seen detail. We look forward to the surprises this mysterious world may bring,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

When Dawn arrives in orbit around Ceres on March 6, to begin its 16 month study of the object it will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit two targets. Dawn orbited Vesta, the second largest body in the asteroid belt, in 2011 and 2012. During its time there, Dawn delivered more than 30,000 images. Those images as well as increasingly sharp views of Ceres can be found on the Dawn mission website at dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

While it is unlikely that asteroid belt objects will contain anything except minerals and ice, the belt could become very important to people on Earth in the coming years. NASA believes the value of the mineral wealth in the asteroid belt to be roughly $100 billion apiece for each of the Earth’s seven billion people.

Several companies and other organizations are currently studying the feasibility of asteroid mining.