News Archive / Tagged: New Horizons

• Opinion: New Horizons should remain a planetary mission

  Laurel KornfeldApril 28th, 2023

  A little-known proposal is threatening the future of NASA’s New Horizons mission, and for reasons unknown, the space press has hardly reported on this development.

• New Horizons is still doing science in the Kuiper Belt

  Laurel KornfeldApril 28th, 2023

  Now traveling far into the Kuiper Belt, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft continues to conduct science observations more than four years after flying by its second target, Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) Arrokoth, in 2019.

• Pluto’s ice volcanoes may still be active today

  Laurel KornfeldMay 14th, 2022

  A new study of Pluto's surface returned by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015 has confirmed the presence of ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet's surface.

• Study of Pluto’s subsurface ocean drives potential return mission

  Laurel KornfeldMarch 12th, 2022

  A $3 billion return mission to Pluto with an orbiter is being proposed to further study the subsurface oceans of both Pluto and its large moon Charon.

• Sublimating nitrogen ice could be cause of polygons in Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia

  Laurel KornfeldJanuary 12th, 2022

  The unusual polygonal features seen in Sputnik Planitia, the left side of Pluto's iconic heart feature known as Tombaugh Regio, could be caused by the sublimation of nitrogen ice, a team of scientists propose in a study published in the journal Nature.

• Pluto’s atmosphere may be starting to condense

  Laurel KornfeldOctober 12th, 2021

  Beginning three years after New Horizons' historic flyby, Pluto's atmosphere appeared to be starting to condense and refreeze, according to scientists.

• Videos simulate Pluto, Charon flyby; follow up mission proposed

  Laurel KornfeldAugust 1st, 2021

  NASA's New Horizons team released new movies simulating the spacecraft's 2015 flight over Pluto and its large moon Charon to mark the sixth anniversary of the encounter on July 14, 2015.

• Surface, geology of Pluto studied via opposition observations

  Laurel KornfeldJuly 4th, 2021

  Six years after the New Horizons spacecraft returned close-up images of Pluto, researchers are teasing out more information about its geology and surface.

• New Horizons spacecraft is now 50 AU from the Sun

  Laurel KornfeldApril 22nd, 2021

  NASA's New Horizons spacecraft achieved a major milestone on Saturday, April 17, when it reached a distance of 50 AU from the Sun.

• Probe finds deep space is not completely dark

  Laurel KornfeldDecember 1st, 2020

  Now more than four billion miles away from Earth, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, acting as a distant space observatory, has found that deep space is not entirely dark.

• Arrokoth’s flattened shape could shed light on planetesimal formation process

  Laurel KornfeldNovember 15th, 2020

  The flattened shape of the two lobes that make up Arrokoth, the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) visited by the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2019, may hold clues to the formation process of planetesimals and even planets.

• New Horizons parallax experiment observes an alien sky

  Laurel KornfeldJune 14th, 2020

  NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now over 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion km) from Earth, successfully imaged two nearby stars displaced from the locations in the sky where they are seen from Earth in its April stellar parallax experiment.

• SOFIA data sheds new light on endurance of Pluto’s atmosphere

  Laurel KornfeldJune 1st, 2020

  Data captured by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne observatory that studied Pluto’s atmospheric hazes just two weeks before New Horizons‘ 2015 flyby, indicates the hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere are regularly replenished.

• New Horizons conducts parallax experiment; team searches for KBOs

  Laurel KornfeldApril 24th, 2020

  More than five billion miles from Earth and over 14 years past launch, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is conducting an experiment measuring the distance to two nearby stars while mission scientists are using Earth-based telescopes to search for new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) for the spacecraft to study.

• New Horizons parallax project seeks public participation

  Laurel KornfeldFebruary 21st, 2020

  NASA’s New Horizons mission is seeking public participation in a project aimed at imaging the two closest stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, from Earth on April 22 and 23, the same day the spacecraft will photograph them from almost five billion miles (eight billion km) away.