Pictured: A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket first stage booster is lifted into position at Space Launch Complex 41, located at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Aug. 8. The Centaur upper stage was hoisted atop the booster today. The vehicle will boost NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or …
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft – and the rocket that will carry it into space, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V – are making significant strides toward launch, planned for Sept. 8. Inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians have installed thermal blankets around the spacecraft (pictured above), culminating …
This blog is from Hal Weaver, who joined the New Horizons team in May 2002, his first assignment after taking a job at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He started out as the principal investigator for the LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and in 2003 became the New Horizons project scientist. Now that …
This New Horizons blog is a team effort between Cathy Olkin, the co-principal investigator of the New Horizons Ralph instrument, and Ralph instrument engineer Eddie Weigle. Just as it takes teamwork to fly a spacecraft to Pluto – even tasks like checking the commands that are sent to the spacecraft are done by a team …
Today's blog is from Anne Verbiscer, a research associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. On the New Horizons science team she studies the scattering properties and composition of icy surfaces in the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. Every year, planets orbiting the sun beyond Earth's orbit reach what …
Fran Bagenal is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who is working on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields. She remembers a …
NASA's Balloon Program Office successfully completed the second test flight of its Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) at 3:54 p.m. EDT, Saturday, July 2, setting a new flight duration record for a mid-latitude flight of a large scientific research balloon. The mission, which began at 7:35 p.m. EDT, May 16 (11:35 a.m., May 17, in New …
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. Nature is a common theme in Canadian literature, with desolate, remote landscapes often playing a role. It should come as no surprise, then, that Canada had a hand in writing the …
A spacecraft designed to sample an asteroid and return that sample to Earth will depend greatly on its communications systems with Earth to relay everything from its health and status to scientific findings from making a detailed survey of the asteroid known as Bennu. That's why engineers from NASA's Deep Space Network spent the past …
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. Pluto and its moons are the most distant worlds ever visited by any of humanity's robotic explorers, but for how much longer will that remain true? New Horizons is outbound through …