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Blue skies, frozen water detected on Pluto

Pluto has blue skies and patches of frozen water, according to the latest data out Thursday from NASA's unmanned New Horizons probe, which made a historic flyby of the dwarf planet in July.

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 ...

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 ...

New Horizons team selects potential Kuiper Belt flyby target

NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits ...

Giant ice volcanoes identified on Pluto

Strange lumpy terrain on Pluto unlike anything previously observed in the solar system indicates that giant ice volcanoes were active relatively recently on the dwarf planet, scientists said on Tuesday.

Alpha Centauri—our first target for interstellar probes?

With the completion of New Horizons' Pluto fly-by, its primary mission, should we now set our sights even higher, ambitiously taking aim at other star systems? If so, Alpha Centauri would probably be considered as the best ...

NASA spaceship closes in on distant world

NASA's unmanned New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on its historic New Year's flyby target, the most distant world ever studied, a frozen relic of the solar system some four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away.

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