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One year from today, everybody’s favorite dwarf planet will receive its first man-made visitor. The New Horizons mission, which launched in 2006, will make its closest flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015.

Right now, Pluto is mainly known as that object in the solar system that used to be a planet (some would argue it was never a planet, simply misclassified as one for a long time). Scientists have been studying the small body since its discovery in 1930 and know a fair amount about its basic properties. But once New Horizons sweeps past and observes Pluto with its collection of high-tech instruments, there will be an explosion of new knowledge about the tiny world.

“Everything we know about Pluto comes from studying it from billions of miles away,” said planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, the mission’s principal investigator. “But the lesson of planetary science is that when we see things up close, our ideas from afar are often overturned.”