Related topics: spacecraft · solar system

The lower atmosphere of Pluto revealed

(PhysOrg.com) -- "With lots of methane in the atmosphere, it becomes clear why Pluto's atmosphere is so warm," says Emmanuel Lellouch, lead author of the paper reporting the results.

Watch Pluto and Charon engage in their orbital dance

Now here's something I guarantee you've never seen before: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the steadily-approaching ...

Hubble harvests distant solar system objects

Beyond the orbit of Neptune reside countless icy rocks known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). One of the biggest, Pluto, is classified as a dwarf planet. The region also supplies us with comets such as famous Comet Halley. ...

Finding Pluto—the hunt for Planet X

Our solar system's shadowy ninth (dwarf) planet was the subject of furious speculation and a frantic search for almost a century before it was finally discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. And remarkably, Pluto's reality ...

Landing on Pluto may only be a hop, skip and jump away

There are plenty of crazy ideas for missions in the space exploration community. Some are just better funded than others. One of the early pathways to funding the crazy ideas is NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. In ...

Pluto's moon Hydra

In 1930, Pluto was observed for the first time. For many decades, astronomers thought that the "ninth planet of the Solar System" was a solitary object. But by 1978, astronomers discovered that it also had a moon roughly ...

A full view of Pluto's stunning crescent from New Horizons

In September, the New Horizons team released a stunning but incomplete image of Pluto's crescent. Thanks to new processing work by the science team, New Horizons is releasing the entire, breathtaking image of Pluto.

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