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New Horizons

    Pluto: Ultraviolet Amazement

    First detection of Pluto with the Alice UV spectrometer. Credits: SwRI/Eric Schindhelm

    Eric Schindhelm is a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He supported the Pluto system encounter in summer 2015 as part of the Atmospheres team for New Horizons. I was very fortunate to participate in the New Horizons Pluto encounter last summer, supporting the Atmospheres science theme team. I arrived at …

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    Pluto Flyby: Through the Eyes of an Early Career Scientist

    Left to right: Marcus Piquette, New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, Mihály Horányi, and former SDC students Jamey Szalay and David James. Credit: JHUAPL

    Today's post is from Marcus Piquette, a third-year graduate student in the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Marcus is a part of the Particle and Plasmas Theme Team working on the Student Dust Counter aboard New Horizons. Hello, I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado in Boulder; …

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    Studying Pluto from 3 Billion Miles Away

    Pre-flyby maps of Pluto

    Today's blog post is from Amanda Zangari, a member of the New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team. She works at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. My name is Amanda Zangari, and I've been a postdoc on the New Horizons mission for 2 ½ years. It's been a wild ride, and it's amazing how …

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    Probing the Mysterious Glacial Flow on Pluto’s Frozen ‘Heart’

    A nearly top-down view of Pluto's icy plains

    "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 …

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    Where Math Meets Pluto

    Pluto's Pattern of Pits

    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 …

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    Plunging through the Solar System’s Dust Disk

    Figure 1. A model of the solar system's dust disk, formed by grains generated at the Kuiper Belt. Credit: Han et al., 2011

    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 …

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    Rotational Movies of Pluto and Charon: It’s Show Time!

    New Horizons Team

    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 …

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    Pluto, Closer to Home

    Examples of polygons on the Earth, Mars and Pluto.

    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 …

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