When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sailed past Pluto on July 14th, 2015, it gathered a treasure trove of information regarding what used to be the 9th planet. Among the most intriguing was an odd “heart shaped” feature on Pluto’s surface which is clearly of more recent origin than what surrounds it. Now, a new study […]
It is in many ways high summer for NASA’s fleet of robotic spacecraft deployed throughout the solar system. On Monday evening, as the fireworks were lighting up the night sky across much of the United States, the space agency’s latest probe, Juno, arrived in orbit around Jupiter. Coming nearly five years after it launched from […]
A new study of Pluto’s massive chasms strongly suggests that the former planet is concealing a liquid water ocean beneath its bizarre and wildly varying surface. From the abstract in Geophysical Research Letters: The New Horizons spacecraft has found evidence for geologic activity on the surface of Pluto, including extensional tectonic deformation of its water […]
It will still be quite some time before scientists receive all the 50 gigabits of data gathered by the New Horizons probe as it sped past Pluto’s system last July, but the first comprehensive set of papers to be published from the history making mission have come out in the journal Science. According to New Horizons […]
From NASA, comments follow: “New data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft point to more prevalent water ice on Pluto’s surface than previously thought. This false-color image, derived from observations in infrared light by the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) instrument, shows where the spectral features of water ice are abundant on Pluto’s surface. It […]
Cryovolcanoes. It sounds like the title to yet another of the Syfy Channel’s horrendous Saturday night movies. Instead, it is only one of a stunning series of discoveries taken from the agonizingly slow (4 kilobits per second) stream of data being transmitted by the New Horizons spacecraft as it speeds away from the Pluto-Charon system. […]
Ostensibly we go, or send our machines, out into space for the advancement of science. It is a goal NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to the Pluto – Charon system has clearly achieved and then some. As the quality of imaging systems has vastly improved over earlier missions however, what continues to delight and to invoke […]
As it speeds away from its historic encounter with Pluto, NASA has identified the most promising target for the New Horizon’s next flyby, and it might present a scheduling issue for mission scientists and space enthusiasts who happen to be college football fans, at least for New Year’s Day 2019. That is when New Horizons […]
Most Recent Image of Pluto Taken Before Flyby: Credit NASA/SWRI Fifty years to the day after NASA’s Mariner 4 took the first images of another planet from deep space as part of its flyby of Mars, the space agency’s New Horizons probe has sailed past the point of its closest approach to the planet Pluto. […]
Credits: NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI) NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is still 6 weeks away from its Bastille Day flyby of former planet Pluto, but based on new data gathered by researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope, it will have an opportunity to provide an up close view of the strange dance being called by the former […]
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