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NASA’s New Horizons to Continue Exploring Outer Solar System
NASA has announced an updated plan to continue New Horizons’ mission of exploration of the outer solar system. Beginning in fiscal year 2025, New Horizons will focus on gathering unique heliophysics data, which can be readily obtained during an extended,…
All Eyes on the Ice Giants
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus and Neptune from its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and the mission team is inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come along for the ride –…
45 Years Ago: Astronomers Discover Pluto’s Moon Charon
In 1978, astronomers considered Pluto as the solar system’s ninth planet. Its great distance from Earth—on average more than three billion miles—meant they knew little about it, including its exact size. On June 22, 1978, U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James…
New Horizons Team Discusses Discoveries from the Kuiper Belt
New Horizons continues to shed light on the mysterious planets and smaller bodies of the outer solar system.
New Horizons Team Adds AI Smarts to Its Kuiper Belt Object Search
By early 1930, Lowell Observatory junior astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had spent months poring over hundreds of telescopic photo plates in the search for a single moving object – which would turn out to be Pluto, the ninth planet.
Update: NASA Extends Exploration for 8 Planetary Science Missions
Editor’s Note: On May 26, 2022 NASA’s New Horizons mission’s second extended mission proposal was approved for implementation. In the two-year extended mission, New Horizons will conduct multi-disciplinary observations contributing to important science for NASA’s Planetary Science, Heliophysics and Astrophysics…
Using “Charon-light,” Researchers Image Pluto’s Dark Side in Faint Moonlight
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made history by returning the first close-up images of Pluto and its moons. Now, through a series of clever methods, researchers led by Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Lab…
Pluto Landmarks Named for Aviation Pioneers Sally Ride and Bessie Coleman
More than 60 years after Bessie Coleman broke the bonds of terra firma to become the first African American woman and Native American to earn a pilot’s license, Sally Ride blasted off aboard shuttle Challenger to become the first American woman in…
NASA’s New Horizons Reaches a Rare Space Milestone
Now 50 times as far from the Sun as Earth, History-Making Pluto Explorer Photographs Voyager 1’s Location from the Kuiper Belt In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA’s New Horizons was still close to home, it…
New Horizons Spacecraft Answers Question: How Dark Is Space?
Correction: A prior version of this release indicated that the New Horizons observations were inconsistent with an earlier study that estimated there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. The New Horizons observations do not place a constraint on the…