When I was a little kid, I loved two things: Space and Dinosaurs. I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut who traveled around space digging up fossils (a xenopaleontologist, if you will). Now, with the hindsight of adulthood, I see this job for what it really would have been: totally badass. But it would probably also face the bane of so many other fun and exciting jobs- terrible pay. Luckily, my childhood ambitions also included simultaneously being a rock and roll icon (slightly strange because I didn’t really get into music until I was on the cusp of adolescence), and those guys make the big bucks.

Another problem with that dream, of course, is that space is mostly cold and unforgiving emptiness, punctuated occasionally by lumps of matter like stars and planets that are usually even more inhospitable. Europa, a moon of Jupiter large enough to be a planet in its own right, is a favorite place for sci-fi writers and science groupies on the internet to imagine life evolving, and there is some evidence that under its surface a vast ocean of liquid water may exist. But Jupiter emits staggering levels of radiation, so much so that even though Europa orbits at a distance of hundreds of thousands of miles, someone standing on its surface would absorb a fatal dose within a matter of hours. So for now, it’s strictly off limits. As a scientist I have confidence we will be able to find ways to survive in the void, but for now we are still in the early days of spaceflight, and we must rely on semi-autonomous probes to go where we cannot.

For over fifty years – even during the heyday of the Apollo program – we’ve been sending probes to the various planets in the solar system. Although many of the instruments they carry serve very specific, slightly arcane scientific roles, each probe has also been equipped with cameras. The photos they send back certainly have valuable scientific purposes, but they also serve a dual role in drumming up public interest. My childhood fascination with space was fueled largely by a hefty tome published by National Geographic entitled ‘Our Universe’, which featured glossy full page photos from the Voyager probes (at the time, still on their main ‘Grand Tour’ mission) and others alongside high end artist depictions of moons, comets, asteroids and the like. Nearer planets – like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – got pages and pages dedicated to close ups and panoramas, but as you traveled further and further from the sun the details got sparser. By the time you reached Pluto, then still a planet, all you got for a photo was a blocky image that needed an arrow pointing at Pluto to distinguish it from the background stars. To make up for it, they included an artist’s depiction of a depressingly dim sunrise from the frosty surface. When would we get a real look, I wondered. The only answer the book could provide was “someday”.

The other part about space is it is big. Huge. Almost incomprehensibly so. When you’re young, you don’t have the attention span to wait years for a probe to arrive at its destination. You move on to the next thing. Even as an adult I’m sometimes amazed at the patience of the scientists and engineers who design these probes and their experimental payloads, and then have to just sit and wait and hope the probe doesn’t just go silent before they get results. But the wait is part of what makes this year so interesting. You see, for the last decade or so, the New Horizons probe has been hurtling towards Pluto at a pace so fast that it went from the launch pad to beyond the orbit of the moon in less time than it took me to fly from Boston to San Francisco. I’ve been checking in on the mission roughly once a year when curiosity strikes, only to groan and say something like “Really? Still?”, as if the timetable would have changed somehow. It’s been so long that Pluto was still the ninth planet when it launched. But now, finally, it’s closing in.

Sad little Pluto, which barely even had a photo in ‘Our Universe’. Demoted to dwarf planet nearly a decade ago. Cold and frozen in the dark at the edge of our solar system. If Pluto was a person, it’d be a goth kid in Canada in the middle of winter, and his yearbook photo would just be a question mark. But this July, New Horizons will arrive and be the first probe to get an actual decent photo of Pluto. Some kind of useful science will doubtless get done, but the pictures, that’s what I’m excited for. Finally, something to replace the absent portrait at the end of the book.

But that’s not the only long-overdue cosmic visit coming this year. Last week I was reading up on space stuff, for one reason or another, and things turned to the minor planets, as they are wont to do. See, there was a time period in the 1800s when the asteroids were first being discovered, and contemporary astronomers classified them as planets. When I first learned that, it had a similar effect to discovering that a favorite musician whose discography you thought you’d exhausted actually had a side project you had never heard about. Which was a thing that could actually happen before the internet went all-knowing on us. Of course, they (the asteroids) were eventually downgraded when people realized just how small they were. The truth is, basically all of them are just lumpy space rocks; poorly produced albums that you were better off not hearing. They were things, not places.

Except one.

Ceres, the largest of the asteroids, is big enough that it’s round. There’s a very scientific explanation for this, but basically it was big enough that its own gravity made it sufficiently malleable to behave a little bit like a fluid. More importantly, being round – somehow – makes it a place rather than a thing.

And we’ve already got a probe en route, a nimble little thing I was only vaguely aware of. A probe that will arrive in less than two months. Right now the best photo we’ve got is only a slight improvement on Pluto’s; a blurry, blocky little thing that wouldn’t look out of place in a Super NES game. Even though it’s essentially right in our cosmic back yard, we know almost nothing about. But by the end of January, the Dawn probe will be fully online, taking photos of Ceres that are fit for blowing up to poster size and framing. And Ceres isn’t just a rock, either. There’s evidence of ice there. It’s hardly the first time we’ve found water in space, but this may turn out to be the most readily accessible.

Over the next few months, as winter recedes and sunlight returns to the Northern hemisphere, we’ll finally be paying these places a visit, long after their original discoverers passed away. And afterwards, we’ll have two “new” frozen little worlds to add to our cosmic family portrait. I’ve been waiting for this since I was 8, but I suppose they’ve been waiting much longer to come in out of the cold.