New Horizons returns last bits of 2015 flyby data to Earth

NASA's New Horizons mission reached a major milestone this week when the last bits of science data from the Pluto flyby – stored on the spacecraft's digital recorders since July 2015 – arrived safely on Earth.

Pluto's 'heart' sheds light on a possible buried ocean

Ever since NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto last year, evidence has been mounting that the dwarf planet may have a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Now, by modeling the impact dynamics that created a massive ...

Shedding light on Pluto's glaciers

What is the origin of the large heart-shaped nitrogen glacier revealed in 2015 on Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft? Two researchers from the Laboratoire de météorologie dynamique (CNRS/École polytechnique/UPMC/ENS ...

X-ray detection sheds new light on Pluto

Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made the first detections of X-rays from Pluto. These observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar ...

New data compare, contrast Pluto's icy moons

A newly downlinked spectral observation of Pluto's moon Nix from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft provides compelling evidence that its surface is covered in water ice, similar to what the New Horizons team discovered recently ...

Secrets revealed from Pluto's 'Twilight Zone'

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft took this stunning image of Pluto only a few minutes after closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image was obtained at a high phase angle -that is, with the sun on the other side of Pluto, ...

New Horizons collects first science on a post-Pluto object

Warming up for a possible extended mission as it speeds through deep space, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has now twice observed 1994 JR1, a 90-mile (145-kilometer) wide Kuiper Belt object (KBO) orbiting more than 3 billion ...

2007 OR10 is the largest unnamed dwarf planet in the solar system

Dwarf planets tend to be a mysterious bunch. With the exception of Ceres, which resides in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, all members of this class of minor planets in our solar system lurk in the depths ...

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