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Astronomers Solve the Mystery of Pluto’s Giant Blades of Ice
New research reveals that the strange formations on Pluto’s surface are made almost entirely of methane ice, and likely formed as a specific kind of erosion wore away their surfaces, leaving dramatic...
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NASA Wants Your Ideas on What to Name New Horizons’ Next Flyby Target
NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is looking for your ideas on what to informally name its next flyby destination, a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto. On New...
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Hydrocarbon Haze Keeps Pluto Cooler Than Expected
Observations from NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft show that Pluto is much colder than predicted, suggesting that atmospheric haze works as a novel cooling mechanism. The gas composition of a planet’s...
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New Data Hints That 2014 MU69 Might Have a Small Moon
Astronomers were already excited to learn this summer that New Horizons’ next flyby target – a Kuiper Belt object a billion miles past Pluto — might be either peanut-shaped or even two objects orbiting...
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New Horizons Spacecraft Captures Record-Breaking Images
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently turned its telescopic camera toward a field of stars, snapped an image – and made history. The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star...
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New Horizons Reveals Dunes Made of Tiny Grains of Solid Methane on Pluto
Dunes are known to form on Earth, Mars, Venus, Titan, and Comet 67P – and now on the dwarf planet Pluto, according to a new study, the latest discovery from New Horizons. These dunes are unlike the...
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New Horizons Makes First Detection of Kuiper Belt Object Ultima Thule
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year’s 2019 close encounter....
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New Horizons Reaches Most Distant Target in History
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds...
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New Ultima Thule Discoveries from New Horizons Spacecraft
Data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which explored the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule earlier this week, is yielding scientific discoveries daily. Among the findings made by the mission science...
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New Movie Shows the Propeller-Like Rotation of Ultima Thule
This movie shows the propeller-like rotation of Ultima Thule in the seven hours between 20:00 UT (3 p.m. ET) on December 31, 2018, and 05:01 UT (12:01 a.m.) on Jan. 1, 2019, as seen by the Long Range...
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Astronomers Release Newest and Best-Yet Image of Ultima Thule
The wonders – and mysteries – of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 continue to multiply as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft beams home new images of its New Year’s Day 2019 flyby target. This image, taken...
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New Horizons Captures Incredible Image Sequence of Ultima Thule
An evocative new image sequence from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft offers a departing view of the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) nicknamed Ultima Thule – the target of its New Year’s 2019 flyby and the most...
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New Horizons Spacecraft Reveals Amazing Views of Ultima Thule
The mission team called it a “stretch goal” – just before closest approach, precisely pointing the cameras on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to snap the sharpest possible pictures of the Kuiper Belt...
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NASA Publishes First Kuiper Belt Flyby Science Results
NASA’s New Horizons mission team has published the first profile of the farthest world ever explored, a planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69. Analyzing just the first sets...
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Meet the Icy World ‘Arrokoth’ From a Billion Miles Beyond Pluto in the Kuiper...
In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the...
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Solar Wind Measurements on New Horizons Spacecraft Help Predict Location of...
Southwest Research Institute built instrument confirms solar wind slows farther away from the Sun. Research could help predict when New Horizons spacecraft will cross the termination shock....
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The Origin of Arrokoth: Birth of a “Snowman” at the Edge of the Solar System
A model developed at the Faculty of Physics at the Technion, in collaboration with German scientists at Tübingen, explains the unique properties of Arrokoth – the most distant object ever imaged in the...
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First Interstellar Parallax Experiment Ever Conducted by NASA’s New Horizons
For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we’d see from Earth. More than four billion miles from home...
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Opposite World: Pluto’s Ice Caps Made of Methane, Turns Earth’s Process...
The mountains discovered on Pluto during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in 2015 are covered by a blanket of methane ice, creating bright deposits strikingly like the...
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New Horizons Spacecraft Data Shows There Are Far Fewer Galaxies in the...
New measurements of the sky’s blackness show galaxies only number in the hundreds of billions. How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe?...
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