Ten years ago, on Jan. 14, 2005, some orange-y image, showing an alien scenery with lots of pebbles in the horizon, was at the center of ESA scientists’ attention.

The snapshot of a distant world’s landscape was truly amazing. It was Saturn’s moon Titan with an orange surface seen through the lens of ESA’s Huygens lander, an exciting one-of-a-kind experience for European scientists as they can proudly say:

NASA’s Dawn mission is closing in on a mysterious, unknown world in the asteroid belt.

The dwarf planet Ceres named after the Roman goddess of agriculture awaits to unlock its secrets.

So far, we’ve only had a glimpse of this enigmatic orb using the Hubble Space Telescope, so it’s more than intriguing what we will find there after Dawn’s arrival. Marc Rayman, the Mission Director and Chief Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, can't hide his contagious excitement: “Everyone should be excited by this.