Tag

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft took this image of Pluto with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 13, 2015.

As it has neared the dwarf planet, the probe has been sending back increasingly clearer images of its target, and got as close as possible at around 11.50am GMT Tuesday – that’s 12.50pm United Kingdom time, 4.50am Pacific time or 9.50pm Australian time. The probe...

“This terrain is not easy to explain”, said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team.

Scientists do not know how Pluto formed such big mountains, the tallest of which juts nearly 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) off the ground, almost as high as the Canadian Rockies.

Taken at a height of 12,500km above the planet it shows complex surface features including plains and mountain ranges. It looked like a fuzzy blob in our best telescopes.

At 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, the spacecraft sent messages back to mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, confirming it had completed its mission, ending nerve-wracking hours for the craft’s operators on Earth. “While...

An unmanned NASA spacecraft whizzed by Pluto yesterday, making its closest approach in the climax of a decade-long journey to explore the dwarf planet for the first time, the USA space agency said.

Jesse Rogerson, a researcher at Toronto’s York University, says studying Pluto’s temperature and terrain will help scientists understand the evolution of various solar systems.

Size matters, even for dwarf planets. Pluto is now officially bigger than Eris, one of hundreds of thousands of mini-planets and comet-like objects circling beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

Maybe New Horizons will find something so interesting that the powers that be will decide to redefine what makes a “planet” yet again. Just because Pluto is bigger than any other known object in the Kuiper Belt does not mean that it’s the most massive or...

That same year, the New Horizons mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a journey of almost 10 years and 4.8 billion kilometers, becoming the first spacecraft to explore this far-away frontier.

Based on Lorri’s reconnaissance, the spacecraft is proceeding on its nominal trajectory, which will take it closer to the dwarf planet than the orbit of Charon, which will be on the opposite side of Pluto during the flyby.

The speed of New Horizon equals that of light and therefore it takes this long duration for the images to reach Earth since the distance between the Earth and the spacecraft is some 4.7 billion kilometres.