NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility technicians began processing a super pressure balloon Thursday, March 17, in preparations for launch from Wanaka, New Zealand, on a long-duration flight. The team is working to be flight ready by April 1. While the first step seemed simple enough—placing the shipping crate containing the balloon on a flatbed trailer—with …
NASA's scientific balloon experts are back in Wanaka, New Zealand, prepping for the fourth flight of an 18.8 million-cubic-foot (532,000 cubic-meter) balloon, with the ambitious goal of achieving an ultra-long-duration flight of up to 100 days at mid-latitudes. Launch of the pumpkin-shaped, football stadium-size balloon is scheduled for sometime after April 1, 2016, from Wanaka …
Today's blog post is from Orkan Umurhan, a mathematical physicist currently working as a senior post-doc at NASA Ames Research Center. He has been on the New Horizons Science Team for over two years. He specializes in astrophysical and geophysical fluid dynamics, and now works on a variety of geophysical problems, including landform evolution modeling …
Today's blog is from Katie Knight, an undergraduate student at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee. She works with the New Horizons team to help map some of the unusual terrain on Pluto, seeking patterns and estimating sizes and shapes of some of its unusual features. Hello! My name is Katie Knight, and I'm here …
Last summer's historic flyby of Pluto and its moons generated a wealth of science data, capturing this new world which had never before been explored. Thousands of high resolution images, spectra and particle data were recorded on the spacecraft's two solid state recorders as the spacecraft flew by its targets. It was a fast flyby, …
Today's blog post is from Kimberly Ennico, a member of the New Horizons' Composition Theme Team and one of the deputy project scientists. She works at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and has been on detail to the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. No one can doubt the beauty of Pluto …
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 …
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; …
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 …
"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 …