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His work involved thousands of hours spent pouring over millions of images of stars, according to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the New Horizons mission for NASA.

New Horizons’ closest approach was scheduled for 4:49 a.m. PDT when the spacecraft would be just 7,800 miles away – close enough to take the first high-resolution images of Pluto’s mottled landscape. But over the past few weeks, we have been able to enjoy...

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.

That’s 10 to 25 kilometers larger than previously estimated.

An image captured by the New Horizons spacecraft and rolled out by NASA on Saturday, displays Pluto’s mystifying dark spots, which are regularly spaced apart and around 300 miles across each. The curtain hasn’t been pulled back like this since NASA’s Voyager 2...

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...

NASA and the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are expecting better close ups as New Horizons closes in on Pluto after a nine year long odyssey through the Solar System.

Most prominent are an elongated dark feature at the equator, informally known as “the whale“, and a large heart-shaped bright area measuring a few 2,000 kilometres across on the right.

The switch also means that science observations are resuming, and it should not be long before fresh images of the dwarf planet and its entourage of moons starts popping up again. “In that same time, our unmanned space missions have been even more successful, and the New...

Further to that, it takes at least four and a half hours for the spacecraft to send data to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., as New Horizons is now 3 billion miles away from Earth.

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...

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.

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...