Tag: New Horizons
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Pluto stakes claim as ‘King of the Kuiper Belt’
Pluto’s bright, mysterious “heart” is rotating into view, ready for its close-up on close approach, in this image taken by New Horizons on July 12 from a distance of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Using high-fidelity modeling and image analysis to resolve Pluto’s exact shape, scientists examining pictures from NASA’s New Horizons…
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NASA probe finally on Pluto’s doorstep
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Three billion miles and nine-and-a-half years from Earth, NASA’s New Horizons probe is racing toward a historic July 14 flyby of Pluto, providing the first close-up views of the most famous denizen of the Kuiper Belt, a vast hinterland…
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Question time with Alan Stern, the Pluto evangelist
Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator, started thinking about a mission to Pluto in the 1980s. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani July is a month of rich rewards for Alan Stern, the scientist who shepherded the New Horizons spacecraft from the drawing board to Pluto, and the payoff will be sweet. New Horizons comes closest to Pluto…
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New Horizons gets last look at Pluto’s mystery spots
New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager captured this view of Pluto early Saturday, July 11, at a distance of 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers). It shows mysterious dark spots along Pluto’s equatorial belt and linear features suggestive of polygonal shapes. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI The New Horizons spacecraft has captured its last view of mysterious dark…
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Pluto probe provides appetizer for next week’s flyby
New Horizons was about 3.7 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Pluto and Charon when it snapped this portrait late on July 8, 2015. Color data from New Horizons’ Ralph instrument was added to colorize the image. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Living up to promises that the view from New Horizons will only get better, the Pluto-bound…
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Back in action, New Horizons returns fresh view of Pluto
This image of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was received on July 8, and has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI The New Horizons spacecraft speeding toward Pluto has returned a new image of the icy world lurking at the solar system’s outer frontier —…
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New Horizons back in business after weekend scare
NASA released this image of Pluto on Monday. Pluto’s equator, where mysterious evenly-spaced dark terrain appears, is seen near the bottom of the dwarf planet’s disk. New Horizons’ LORRI telescopic camera took this image July 3, and scientists added color data from the spacecraft’s Ralph imager recorded earlier in the mission. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University…
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Technical problem pauses Pluto probe’s science operations
File photo of the New Horizons control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on Laurel, Maryland. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL NASA’s New Horizons space probe, 10 days from a one-shot encounter with enigmatic Pluto, stopped collecting science data Saturday after a technical problem interrupted the spacecraft’s tightly-choreographed flight plan. Engineers at the New Horizons…
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Two faces of Pluto revealed in color imagery
Two images from New Horizons taken June 25 and June 27 show two very different sides of Pluto. Pluto’s equator is located near the bottom of the planet’s disk, as illustrated in the diagram. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute The first well-resolved color photos of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft,…
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New Horizons gets ‘all clear’ for Pluto flyby
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute After an exhaustive search for heretofore unseen rings, small moons or other space debris, senior managers concluded Wednesday that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, hurtling toward a July 14 flyby of Pluto at…