In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA's New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready ...
Space Exploration
Apr 19, 2021
2
13768
Jupiter has some of the most conspicuous atmospheric features in our solar system. The planet's Great Red Spot, large enough to envelop Earth, is nearly as well known as some of the various rivers and mountains on the planet ...
Astronomy
Oct 19, 2023
5
212
When firefighters want to extinguish a blaze, they often douse it with water. Astronauts on board the ISS, however, are experimenting with a form of water that does the opposite. Instead of stopping fire, this water helps ...
Space Exploration
Jan 13, 2014
20
0
(Phys.org) —Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip.
Space Exploration
Aug 6, 2013
59
1
A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event—called AT2018cow and nicknamed "the Cow" after the coincidental final letters in its ...
Astronomy
Jan 11, 2019
0
327
The newest high-resolution images of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons are both dazzling and mystifying, revealing a multitude of previously unseen topographic and compositional details. The image below—showing an area near ...
Space Exploration
Sep 25, 2015
7
1486
Pluto's day is 6.4 Earth days long. The images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera as the distance between New Horizons and Pluto decreased from 5 ...
Space Exploration
Nov 20, 2015
4
671
The puzzling appearance of an ice cloud seemingly out of thin air has prompted NASA scientists to suggest that a different process than previously thought—possibly similar to one seen over Earth's poles—could be forming ...
Space Exploration
Sep 21, 2016
3
1070
The nitrogen ice glaciers on Pluto appear to carry an intriguing cargo: numerous, isolated hills that may be fragments of water ice from Pluto's surrounding uplands. These hills individually measure one to several miles or ...
Space Exploration
Feb 4, 2016
1
1559
Some 1,500 light years from Earth, a mystery of stellar proportions is playing out. A singular star out there captured scientists' and the public's imagination in September 2015 with its strangely fluctuating brightness. ...
Astronomy
Oct 5, 2017
8
218
