OUTERPLANETS

845 articles

The PI's Perspective: Anticipation on Ultima's Doorstep
Dec 28, 2018 (SPX)
In just a few days, on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, New Horizons will swoop three times closer to our target-2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule)-than we fl...
NASA spaceship closes in on distant world
Dec 28, 2018 (AFP)
The cosmic object, known as Ultima Thule, is about the size of the US capital, Washington, and orbits in the dark and frigid Kuiper Belt about a billion miles b...
All About Ultima: New Horizons Flyby Target is Unlike Anything Explored in Space
Dec 27, 2018 (SPX)
Ultima, as the flyby target is affectionately called by the New Horizons team, is orbiting in the heart of our solar system's Kuiper Belt, far beyond Neptune. T...
New Horizons Notebook: On Ultima's Doorstep
Dec 24, 2018 (SPX)
At 7:53 a.m. EST on Dec. 18, New Horizons fired its small thrusters for just 27 seconds, a 0.26 meter-per-second adjustment that corrected about 180 miles (300 ...
NASA spacecraft hurtles toward historic New Year's flyby
Dec 24, 2018 (AFP)
Four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away, the unmanned spaceship, New Horizons, is poised to zoom by at 12:33 am (0533 GMT) on January 1, at a distance ...
Astronomers identify cycle of disturbances at Jupiter's equator
Dec 21, 2018 (SPX)
Jupiter's striped appearance of light zones and dark brown belts provides breathtaking views through amateur and professional telescopes alike. But Jupiter's st...
Teledyne e2v has provided New Horizons with two specialist image sensors
Dec 21, 2018 (SPX)
When the mission sweeps past the 30km wide object on New Year's Day, it will be making the most distant ever visit to a Solar System body - at some 6.5 billion ...
Ultima Thule's First Mystery: Lack of a 'Light Curve'
Dec 21, 2018 (SPX)
Those measurements have produced the mission's first mystery about Ultima. Even though scientists determined in 2017 that the Kuiper Belt object isn't shaped li...
New Horizons Takes the Inside Course to Ultima Thule
Dec 19, 2018 (SPX)
After almost three weeks of sensitive searches for rings, small moons and other potential hazards around the object, New Horizons principal investigator Alan St...
Most Distant Solar System Object Ever Observed
Dec 18, 2018 (SPX)
The new object was announced on Monday, December 17, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center [https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/...
A nuclear-powered 'tunnelbot' to search for life on Jupiter's icy moon Europa
Dec 18, 2018 (SPX)
"Estimates of the thickness of the ice shell range between 2 and 30 kilometers (1.2 and 18.6 miles), and is a major barrier any lander will have to overcome in ...
NASA's Juno mission halfway to Jupiter science
Dec 13, 2018 (JPL)
Juno is in a highly-elliptical 53-day orbit around Jupiter. Each orbit includes a close passage over the planet's cloud deck, where it flies a ground track that...
Record Setting Course-Correction Puts New Horizons on Track to Kuiper Belt Flyby
Dec 10, 2018 (SPX)
Just as the exploration of Ultima Thule will be the farthest-ever flyby of a planetary body, Sunday's maneuver was the most distant trajectory correction ever m...
Radio JOVE From NASA: Tuning In to Your Local Celestial Radio Show
Dec 04, 2018 (SPX)
The universe is full of radio emissions. Many objects in space emit radio waves, and scientists can detect them here on Earth after they have filtered through t...
The PI's Perspective: Share the News - The Farthest Exploration of Worlds in History is Beginning
Nov 28, 2018 (SPX)
As someone who follows New Horizons, let your friends and social media followers know about the upcoming exploration of Ultima and that New Horizons and NASA wi...
Encouraging prospects for moon hunters
Nov 26, 2018 (SPX)
Our solar system has numerous moons around planets: Apart from Earth and Mars, also Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus all have natural satellites. The questio...
Evidence for ancient glaciation on Pluto
Nov 14, 2018 (SPX)
The letter "Washboard and Fluted Terrains on Pluto as Evidence for Ancient Glaciation" focuses on these distinctive landscapes that border the vast nitrogen ice...
WorldWide Telescope looks ahead to New Horizons' Ultima Thule glyby
Oct 25, 2018 (SPX)
The 2-minute video, prepared using the AAS's WorldWide Telescope "Universe Information System," was unveiled coincident with a DPS press conference during which...
SwRI team makes breakthroughs studying Pluto orbiter mission
Oct 25, 2018 (SPX)
Associate Vice President and planetary scientist Dr. Alan Stern leads the SwRI study. The team first discovered how numerous key scientific objectives can be me...
ALMA maps temperature of Jupiter's icy moon Europa
Oct 24, 2018 (SPX)
A new series of four images of Europa taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has helped astronomers create the first global thermal ...
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