SpaceNews’ special coverage of New Horizon's history-making Pluto flyby — including an archived liveblog documenting the encounter as it unfolded over four exciting days — is sponsored by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
The member of Congress who played the biggest role in getting New Horizons funded and launched paid a visit to the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) on Monday (April 13) to wish the team the best for the upcoming flyby.
A software developer that specializes in astrophysics simulations is hoping to rally support for science and space exploration with its free mobile app, Pluto Safari, which tracks the New Horizons spacecraft as it zooms ever closer the distant dwarf planet.
For Alan Stern, the wait is almost over. On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, after a journey spanning nearly a decade, will fly past Pluto at 50,000 kilometers per hour, becoming the first spacecraft to make a close approach to this distant world that, for three-quarters of a century, was classified as the ninth planet.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has exited a protective safe mode that project officials said July 6 was triggered when the spacecraft’s primary computer became overloaded.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft suffered an anomaly July 4 that put the spacecraft into a protective safe mode less than ten days before its flyby of Pluto, but project scientists are confident the spacecraft will resume normal operations within a few days.
In this episode of the SpaceGeeks podcast, Dan Leone catches up with New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern days ahead of the historic Pluto flyby. The former NASA science boss explains what it's like to fill in one of the last blank spaces on the map: the never-before-seen-up-close planet/dwarf planet/ice dwarf at the edge of the mysterious and enormous Kuiper belt.
After nearly nine-and-a-half years of flight, and an even longer effort to build it, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is poised to provide scientists with their first — and, perhaps for many decades, only — close-up look at the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons.
While the demotion of Pluto to the status of "dwarf planet" makes perfect sense to some scientists and outrages others, it also provides teachers around the world a wonderful opportunity to engage students in lively discussions that will expose them to astronomy, scientific debate and the very strange nature of the outer solar system.
NASA wants to put the outer planets within reach of budget-constrained space missions by making available a new type of radioisotope power system capable of cranking out abundant, long-lasting electrical power at a fraction of the cost of today's plutonium-fueled spacecraft batteries.
A NASA probe traveling to Pluto will hit the accelerator in February when it flies past the planetary giant Jupiter.
The International Astronomical Union has officially christened Pluto's two newest satellites Nix and Hydra.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is being readied for a January liftoff to the outer reaches of the solar system. It will be humanity's first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt — a vast and distant repository of the solar system's leftover building materials — and is expected to reap rich scientific rewards.
A strike by Boeing machinists that began Nov. 2 has forced one U.S. government launch to be scrapped until early next year, put two other launches on indefinite hold and sparked a war of words over a fourth launch that is proceeding with Boeing union and non union launch teams.