Suggested Searches

Pluto New Horizons

    From Canada to Pluto and Beyond

    Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope and the Gemini North observatory

    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 …

    Read Full Post

    A World Beyond Pluto: Finding a New Target for New Horizons

    The left image shows thin swirls of bright golden material flowing off the Sun's surface. The outline of a white box is over a speckled area of the surface, in gray and bright gold. On the right, is that area in different wavelengths. The image is purple, black, red, orange, and right yellow. In the highlighted area, the speckles are a very bright yellow with some cooler purple areas.

    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 …

    Read Full Post

    New Horizons: Getting to Know a KBO

    The four observations of 1994 JR1 that New Horizons made in November 2015. The KBO is the dot in the center, and the stars are moving past in the background. Credits: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI

    Today's post is written by Simon Porter, a New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Simon's work focuses on the small satellites of Pluto. Hi, I'm Simon Porter, a postdoctoral researcher on NASA's New Horizons mission. In this blog post, I'm going to talk about our observations of the Kuiper …

    Read Full Post

    Rewriting the Playbook on Pluto

    Book cover Pluto and Charon

    Richard Binzel is a professor of planetary science and joint professor of aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a member of the original "Pluto Underground" that struggled for more than two decades to bring a Pluto mission from dream to reality. Through all the years of planning and conducting the …

    Read Full Post

    Processing Pluto’s Pictures

    Pluto's moons

    This week's blog comes from Tod Lauer, a research astrophysicist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. New Horizons Principal Investigator: "Lauer! We've got to have full resolution! Now!" Me: "I'm pushing the images as hard as I can – any more and the pixels will blow apart for sure!" Okay, the New …

    Read Full Post

    Behind the Lens at New Horizons’ Pluto Flyby

    Members of the Composition team compare their three independent analyses of the spectrum, which showed the very first detection of water ice.

    Today's blog is from Henry Throop, a New Horizons science team member and senior research scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Mumbai, India. In a previous blog post, I wrote about software the New Horizons team used to image Pluto. Here, I'm going to talk about my work photographing the team itself. We knew …

    Read Full Post

    Imaging the Encounter of a Lifetime

    Mission science team

    Jorge Núñez, a planetary scientist and engineer from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), is the deputy systems engineer of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument on New Horizons. He studies the geology and composition of planetary surfaces using a variety of remote-sensing techniques. When not working on New Horizons or analyzing …

    Read Full Post

    A Picture of Pluto is Worth a Thousand Words

    Topographic profile, taken from a preliminary digital terrain model, with crater dimension marked

    Today's blog 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, especially through the study of impact craters. A spacecraft flies to Pluto, amazing images of this alien disk are sent back to Earth for us …

    Read Full Post

    Planning for Pluto with GeoViz

    New Horizons GeoViz

    Today's blog is from Dr. Henry Throop, a planetary scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Mumbai, India. He received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His areas of research include the outer solar system, the rings of Jupiter and Saturn, and planet formation in the Orion Nebula. He has been …

    Read Full Post

    Pluto Flyby: The Story of a Lifetime

    Image of People Surrounding a computer

    "You can report on history, or you can be part of it." This quote – from a colleague here at NASA – sums up what inspired me to take a giant leap from a digital newsroom to the mission operations center for the July 2015 New Horizons Pluto flyby. I'm Laurie Cantillo, and as media …

    Read Full Post