SwRI to plan Pluto orbiter mission

NASA has funded Southwest Research Institute to study the important attributes, feasibility and cost of a possible future Pluto orbiter mission. This study will develop the spacecraft and payload design requirements and make ...

SwRI to conduct largest-ever Hubble survey of the Kuiper Belt

NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) recently awarded Southwest Research Institute the largest Hubble Space Telescope (HST) solar system program ever, with 206 of Hubble's orbits around the Earth allocated to ...

New Horizons team rehearses for New Year's flyby

You never know what you're going to see when you visit a world for the first time—particularly when it's on the solar system's most distant frontier – but you can get ready to see it.

Help nickname New Horizons' next flyby target

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.

Astronomer helping NASA spacecraft explore beyond Pluto

The computer found it first – Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69  – but University of Virginia astronomer Anne Verbiscer was the "human backup" who found it next. She confirmed the finding for NASA by using the same technique ...

How do we know there's a Planet 9?

At this point, I think the astronomy textbook publishers should just give up. They'd like to tell you how many planets there are in the solar system, they really would. But astronomers just can't stop discovering new worlds, ...

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