Tag

Over the weekend, an unmanned NASA spacecraft was on its way to a momentous encounter with Pluto. The categories include historical space missions, spacecraft, scientists and explorers, as well as beings, locations and characters from myths pertaining to the underworld – a...

New Horizons is less than 11 million miles away from Pluto.

For decades scientists have suspected that Pluto was a bit reddish but they weren’t really sure until NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft snapped shots of the dwarf planet from about 10 million miles away.

In a mission update, NASA said the team lost contact with the piano-sized probe at 1:54 p.m. ET, when it had less than 12 million miles left in its 3 billion-mile journey to the dwarf planet.

Yes, there is methane on Pluto, and, no, it doesn’t come from cows.

Why, you might ask yourself, would the guys who made everyone’s favorite middle school couples’ skate songs on the planet hang out with planetary scientists running humanity’s first mission to study Pluto? New Horizons principal investigator Dr Alan Stern of the...

As New Horizons approaches the planet, the team is starting to look for more detailed features.

As NASA’s New Horizons steadily makes its way to the Pluto system, the spacecraft has confirmed that there is methane on the planet. And so is New Horizons, which will fulfill its destiny when it performs a flyby of Pluto on July 14th.

Yes, you guessed correctly; even the most powerful telescopes in the world, including Hubble, don’t do a lot better, because Pluto is smaller than our moon, and a long, long way away. The New Horizons spacecraft will shriek past Pluto at 14km/s, passing roughly 7,750 miles...