OUTERPLANETS

845 articles

SOFIA finds clues hidden in Pluto's haze
May 14, 2020 (SPX)
Remote observations of Pluto by NASA's telescope on an airplane, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, show that the thin haze enshrou...
New evidence of watery plumes on Jupiter's moon Europa
May 13, 2020 (SPX)
In computer simulations they strove to reproduce the data gathered by the onboard particle detector that was developed and built at MPS and in the USA. This was...
Telescopes and spacecraft join forces to probe deep into Jupiter's atmosphere
May 08, 2020 (SPX)
Three years of imaging observations using the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF's NOIRLab, have probed deep into Jupiter's cloud tops. The ultr...
Newly reprocessed images of Europa show 'chaos terrain' in crisp detail
May 04, 2020 (JPL)
Although the data captured by Galileo is more than two decades old, scientists are using modern image processing techniques to create new views of the moon's su...
Mysteries of Uranus' oddities explained by Japanese astronomers
Apr 30, 2020 (SPX)
Instead of thinking about the reality of stars spread in all directions and at various distances from the Earth, it is easier to understand by envisioning the c...
Jupiter probe JUICE: Final integration in full swing
Apr 24, 2020 (SPX)
Next stop: Noordwijk, The Netherlands, the home of the European Space Agency's space test centre ESTEC, where the probe has to undergo its thermal vaccum enviro...
The birth of a Snowman at the edge of the Solar System
Apr 23, 2020 (SPX)
The researchers' findings, published in the Nature, explain the unique characteristics of "the Snowman," known formally as Arrokoth, It is the farthest imaged o...
New Horizons pushing the frontier ever deeper into the Kuiper Belt
Apr 16, 2020 (SPX)
Before I update you on mission news, I want to highlight something cool on our mission website . There's a crazy amount of detail there for anyone interested in...
Jupiter's Great Red Spot shrinking in size, not thickness
Mar 17, 2020 (SPX)
The cloud layer is extremely opaque, making it hard to observe at deeper levels. However, using laboratory experiments, analyses and numerical simulations, scie...
Researchers find new minor planets beyond Neptune
Mar 12, 2020 (SPX)
The goal of DES, which completed six years of data collection in January, is to understand the nature of dark energy by collecting high-precision images of the ...
Ultraviolet instrument delivered for ESA's Jupiter mission
Feb 26, 2020 (SPX)
Aboard JUICE, UVS will get close-up views of the Galilean moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, all thought to host liquid water beneath their icy surfaces. UVS ...
One Step Closer to the Edge of the Solar System
Feb 20, 2020 (SPX)
IRF will build the plasma spectrometer instrument for the TRIDENT mission. The instrument will investigate the state and composition of the ionosphere of Triton...
Findings from Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery
Feb 19, 2020 (JPL)
An accurate estimate of the total amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere has been on the wish lists of planetary scientists for decades: The figure in the gas ...
TRIDENT Mission Concept Selected by NASA's Discovery Program
Feb 19, 2020 (SPX)
Among these are the Trident and DAVINCI+ mission concepts. Trident's Principal Investigator is the Universities Space Research Association's (USRA) Louise Prock...
A close-up of Arrokoth reveals how planetary building blocks were constructed
Feb 14, 2020 (SPX)
The new reports are based on over ten times as much data from the flyby. Together, they provide a far more complete picture of the composition and origin of Arr...
New Horizons team discovers a critical piece of the planetary formation puzzle
Feb 14, 2020 (SPX)
The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the ancient Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019, providing humankind's first close-up look at one of t...
Pluto's icy heart makes winds blow
Feb 05, 2020 (SPX)
Pluto's famous heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA's New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 201...
Why Uranus and Neptune are different
Feb 05, 2020 (SPX)
"However, there are also striking differences between the two planets that require explanation," says Christian Reinhardt, who studied Uranus and Neptune togeth...
Seeing stars in 3D: The New Horizons Parallax Program
Jan 30, 2020 (SPX)
In April, New Horizons, which by then will be more than 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth, nearing 5 billion miles (8 billion kilometers) from home, will...
Looking back at a New Horizons New Year's to remember
Jan 06, 2020 (SPX)
A year ago, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (now known as Arrokoth) in the early hours of New Year's Day, ushering in ...
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