 Two missions this year have given us a glimpse of truly uncharted worlds, and the science data we're getting back from them may end up rewriting our books. This is your space pod for December 11th, 2015. One could make a very good argument that for exploration, 2015 was the year of the dwarf planet. We had Ceres arrive at dawn and New Horizons fly by Pluto, and if there's one thing that we learned from the exploration of these two worlds, it's that to expect the unexpected. The first of the arrivals this year was dawn at Ceres. After exploring the largest asteroid in our solar system, Vesta, in 2011 and 2012, dawn spent three years traveling to Ceres. Our view of the only dwarf planet closer than Neptune was originally just a pixelated Hubble Space Telescope image, but on approach, every day, the detail got better and better. These look surprisingly active for something of its size. It has some features on its terrain, like Ahunamans, an interestingly shaped mountain five kilometers high. There's also the bright spots on Ceres' surface, the most prominent of which is found in the crater Ocater. It's currently called Bright Spot 5, and we found haze hanging over it, possibly from outgassing of materials. Just recently it was narrowed down to what the bright spot was composed of, Magnesiumulfate, extremely similar to what we call Epsom salts here on Earth, so you may have something with the same composition as the bright spots on Ceres in your bathroom right now. As to what this means about Ceres, well, we're going to have to find out in the future. Dawn is finally beginning to enter its lowest orbit, 375 kilometers above the surface, and it will eventually end its mission in 2016. Speaking of dwarf planets, in the middle of 2015, a piano sized probe called New Horizons culminated a nine and a half year journey across five billion kilometers, and found something unbelievable, Pluto and its vastly complex terrain. So complex, scientists working on the mission have called it Chaos Terrain, and some of the latest high resolution imagery of Pluto's surface showing pits, canyons, and tall mountains of water ice suggest extremely active geological processes on a world that we expected to be dead. To say that Pluto has surprised us would be an understatement, its surface is striking in just how varied the terrain seems to be, towering mountains set directly against vast smooth plains, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices are present on the surface with methane in the atmosphere. But due to the distance New Horizons is away from the sun, the high quality scientific data is only just now coming in. That data downlink rate from New Horizons is at about one kilobyte per second. That means that it's going to take literally an entire year from now just to get all of that high quality data back. But what's a year of waiting for the best data on Pluto ever when it took you nine and a half years to get there in the first place? Thanks for watching this space pod, I'm Jared Head. What do you think is waiting for us and the data we haven't gotten yet from Dawn and New Horizons? Well let me know in the comments below and don't forget to like and subscribe to us. Also make sure to check out our Patreon campaign which we've now moved to being monthly. So until the next space pod, keep exploring.