"Since its discovery, Pluto has proven consistently troublesome to the theorist." – Sir Patrick Moore, The Observer's Book of Astronomy (1971) Written 45 years ago, these words are more appropriate today than Moore could have ever imagined. Greetings, I'm Dr. Orkan Umurhan, a scientist on New Horizons' Geology and Geophysics Investigation (GGI) Team. Pluto's surface …
Today's post is written by Alex Parker, a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, working on NASA's New Horizons mission. As New Horizons flew by Pluto, it recorded spectacular images of the icy world's surface using the LORRI and MVIC cameras. It recorded the plasma and dust environments with the PEPSSI, …
Greetings and Salutations! I'm Dr. Orkan Umurhan, a scientist on New Horizons' Geology and Geophysics Investigation (GGI) Team. This is my first blog entry about my experiences on this most excellent mission. Over the upcoming months and years I intend to share the scientific questions I work on pertaining to New Horizons, and I hope …
Today's post is written by Jamey Szalay, a New Horizons graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. Jamey just completed his PhD at CU and has accepted a postdoc at SwRI to work on NASA's next New Frontiers mission, JUNO, which arrives at Jupiter on July 4, 2016. For the last five and a …
Today's blog post is written by Constantine Tsang, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Con was a member of the New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics Investigations (GGI) and Composition teams during the Pluto flyby, creating approach and photometric stereo movies of Pluto's terrain. It's amazing that we've come such …
Today's post is from Veronica Bray, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. She specializes in comparing the surfaces of planetary bodies across the solar system. I love looking at New Horizons' images of Pluto! But I spend most of my time looking elsewhere. Why? Because comparing Pluto with other planetary …
Today's post is from William Woods, a doctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He investigates radioscience and remote sensing, with a focus on signal processing for the radioscience experiment (REX) onboard New Horizons. He studies both engineering and science under Dr. Ivan Linscott and Dr. Howard Zebker at Stanford. I study remote sensing …
Today's post is written by Josh Kammer, a New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Josh came to SwRI directly after his PhD in planetary science from Caltech; his undergrad work in chemistry was at Texas A&M. Josh's work on New Horizons focuses on analysis of ultraviolet spectra acquired …
Today's post is written by one of the early career members of the New Horizons Science Team. Alissa Earle is a graduate student in Planetary Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on the long-term seasonal variations that may be affecting what we see on Pluto's surface. Pluto's diverse surface, typified by …
Hello! It's Kelsi Singer again from the New Horizons science team to talk about one of my favorite planetary geologic features –impact craters. They may just look like holes in the ground, but amazingly, craters can give us all sorts of useful clues to a planet's history. There are many ways scientists investigate a planet …
