Recent Items

New Horizons Pluto Kuiper Belt Flyby   Active New Horizons is a mission designed to fly by Pluto and its moon Charon and transmit images and data back to Earth. It will then continue on into the Kuiper Belt where it will fly by a one or more Kuiper Belt Objects and return further data. The primary objectives are to characterize the global geology and morphology and map the surface composition of Pluto and Charon and characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate.
May 23, 2008

NASA New Horizons Mission: The PI's Perspective: Green Beacons for a Golden Bird   Active As you read these words, the New Horizons spacecraft remains in a long period of almost continuous hibernation, which began on Feb. 21 and stretches until Sept. 2. During this time the spacecraft will fly from nine to almost 11 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is, covering more than 300 million more kilometers! Except for two weeks of high activity that begins May 20, the spacecraft is running on its own, and doing little besides reporting its status each Monday and delivering a brief telemetry report most Thursdays.
May 01, 2008

New Horizons, to infinity and beyond!   Active I stumbled across this image while looking up Quaoar. I knew a number of Trans-Neptunian objects have been discovered, but I had never seen them portrayed before. Click on the image to see the full size version, it’s quite detailed. When I grew up the solar system was a pretty simple thing, who knew it would explode into dozens of dwarf planets? All of these are pretty small compared to the Earth, and from where they are the sun is just a very bright star. Will we be colonizing any of these puppies? Not anytime soon I suspect. Still, we should familiarize ourselves with them…one never knows what the future brings.
February 20, 2008

New Horizons Catches a Break   Active Pluto's atmosphere is a strange duck. Made up primarily of methane and nitrogen, it's present only when Pluto is close to the sun. As Pluto moves away from our star--as it has been doing since 1989--the temperature of its atmosphere drops. Eventually, it gets so cold that the methane and nitrogen solidify and fall to the surface as ice and snow.
February 19, 2008

Two Years on the Road to the Ninth Planet   Active Just like the parent of a kid growing up from an infant to a toddler, my experience with New Horizons in flight - since our launch two years ago this week - is that the first two years have passed amazingly quickly and yet amazingly slowly, all at the same time.
January 18, 2008