. >> woodruff: our own jenny marder helped produce that piece and visited nasa for the story. ins me now. jenny, thank you for being here. really interesting. you heard the mission director saying this is about learning about the origins of our solar system. >> that's right. ceres is known as a protoplanet, and that means scientists believe it was in the process of forming a full-pledged planet, and its formation was suddenly halted like by the tremendous gravity of jupiter. so what you're really seeing is a planet in the process of forming, so it's a window into the beginning to have the solar system. >> woodruff: as we saw in the description in the pictures, the spacecraft, dawn, is getting closer and closer. we heard him talk about the bright spots. what is the spacecraft seeing now? >> the spacecraft is maneuvering, now, from its third to its second orbit each orbit brings it closer and closer to the surface of ceres. >>ceres. so we're seeing images of craters, valleys a three-mile-high cone that sort of looks like a colonel cano on earth and we're seeing these bright spots