Rosetta’s dust-analysing COSIMA (COmetary Secondary Ion Mass Analyser) instrument has made the first unambiguous detection of solid organic matter in the dust particles ejected by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in the form of complex carbon-bearing molecules.

While organics had already been detected in situ on the comet’s surface by instruments on-board Philae and from orbit by Rosetta’s ROSINA , those were both in the form of gases resulting from the sublimation of ices. By contrast, COSIMA has made its detections in solid dust.

On Thursday, Science released a half-dozen papers that analyzed data the Dawn mission sent home from the largest body in the asteroid belt, a dwarf planet called Ceres. Headlines will focus on signs of water ice and a possible ice-powered volcano, but the reports themselves really end up emphasizing how much we still don’t know about the strange world. Despite all of Dawn’s imaging, many features don’t add up to a coherent picture of the body as a whole.

Before Dawn got there, our impression of Ceres was dominated by what we’d measured of its density. Those measurements suggested the dwarf planet has a substantial amount of water and is large enough to have differentiated, allowing rocky material to sink to the core. So we expected Dawn to find an icy world where viscous ice has gradually wiped away many of the indications of the impacts every Solar System body has suffered.

That’s not at all what Dawn found. Instead, only the largest impact craters on Ceres seem to show any sign of viscous changes. This lack of viscous change suggests that Ceres’ crust is much more rigid than it would be if it were comprised of water ice.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if our future looks like what artists have dreamt up for us or not. It’s the ideas and seeds that they plant that make us believe such things could exist that matter. Would the helicopter exist if Leonardo da Vinci hadn’t inspired us with the design of the aerial screw? Impossible to say, but at every step of our journey into space artists have been there to show us the possibilities, pushing at the boundaries of what mankind is capable of with their imagination and artistic skill, laying out the path to possible futures, and providing inspiration to generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers.

Probably the coolest thing I saw in the JunoCam image releases was this view of a Jupiter storm that has enough vertical structure to cast interesting shadows as it rotates into sunset near Jupiter’s north pole. At first glance it looks like an Enceledan polar impact crater – but this thing is way bigger than that, bigger than Enceladus, closer to the scale of Earth!