The field for NASA's next New Frontiers mission is narrowing. Officials announced the two finalists for a new robotic explorer mission—one that would send a spacecraft to bring samples of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ...
Space Exploration
Dec 21, 2017
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Scientists were already excited to learn this summer that New Horizons' next flyby target – a Kuiper Belt object a billion miles past Pluto – might be either peanut-shaped or even two objects orbiting one another. Now ...
Space Exploration
Dec 12, 2017
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6
Back in October, the announcement that the first interstellar asteroid triggered a flurry of excitement. Since that time, astronomers have conducted follow-up observations of the object known as 1I/2017 U1 (aka. 'Oumuamua) ...
Space Exploration
Nov 24, 2017
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The gas composition of a planet's atmosphere generally determines how much heat gets trapped in the atmosphere. For the dwarf planet Pluto, however, the predicted temperature based on the composition of its atmosphere was ...
Space Exploration
Nov 15, 2017
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NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is looking for your ideas on what to informally name its next flyby destination, a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.
Space Exploration
Nov 7, 2017
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21
NASA's New Horizons mission revolutionized our knowledge of Pluto when it flew past that distant world in July 2015. Among its many discoveries were images of strange formations resembling giant knife blades of ice, whose ...
Space Exploration
Sep 27, 2017
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A long summer break ended for NASA's New Horizons on Sept. 11, as the spacecraft "woke" itself on schedule from a five-month hibernation period.
Space Exploration
Sep 13, 2017
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The Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union has officially approved the naming of 14 features on the surface of Pluto. These are the first geological features on the planet ...
Space Exploration
Sep 7, 2017
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11
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has submitted a proposal to NASA outlining a daring New Frontiers-class mission concept that would use an instrumented, radioisotope-powered dual-quadcopter to explore potential ...
Space Exploration
Aug 24, 2017
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Could the next flyby target for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft actually be two targets?
Space Exploration
Aug 7, 2017
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