Pluto

Soar Over Pluto’s Heart at 77,000 Kilometers in This New Animation

This animated flyover of the Norgay mountains and Sputnik plains on Pluto are based on the freshly-delivered close-approach images from the New Horizons flyby. See features just a single kilometre big as you experience what it would be like to hitch a ride on the spacecraft as it skimmed past the dwarf planet. This flyby…

We Can Thank Plutonium for Everything We’ve Learned About Pluto

Our epic journey to Pluto has been filled with cosmic coincidences. Crossing Neptune’s orbit 25 years to the day after Voyager 2. Zipping by Pluto 50 years on the nose after our first Mars encounter. But my favorite serendipitous fact of all has to do with how we’ve powered the entire New Horizons mission—using none…

How our view of Pluto has changed over the years

Pluto was discovered back in 1930 and that cute dwarf planet has been a blurry gray pixelated object to us ever since. Though our view of Pluto has gotten better ever so slightly over the years, we’ve never seen it in detail until the New Horizons spacecraft flew by everyone’s favorite former planet. SpaceSciNewsroom put…

The Ice of Pluto is More Diverse Than We Realized

We give up: Pluto is out to surprise us. This time it’s the ice. We thought it’d be easy once we confirmed ice caps of methane and nitrogen, but the story is much more complicated. The entire world has methane ice, but it’s concentrated at the equator and relatively thin at the pole. Yesterday, NASA…

What’s the First Big Science Story You Remember?

NASA’s Pluto flyby is a truly international event, not limited by borders: the excitement and commentary span the planet. But this phenomenon isn’t new. What’s the first giant, global science story you remember? The internet has amplified the reach of scientific discoveries, letting us react in real time. As we’ve seen, this can be a…

Pluto Is a Geologically Active World, But We Don’t Know Why

Data is streaming in from New Horizons after yesterday’s historic flyby of Pluto — and it’s painting a picture of the dwarf planet that we could have scarcely imagined. Above: The icy mountains of Pluto. This is the bottom edge of the iconic Heart of Pluto. We’re looking at the boundary between the Heart —…

Charon, You are a Glorious, Beautiful, Complicated Moon

This is Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, in the most beautiful, detailed, highest-resolution single frame image we’ll be downlinking from the flyby this month. And it is amazing. This image was taken just 466,000 kilometers (289,000 miles) from Charon within hours of New Horizon’s closest approach early on July 14, 2015. The image was taken with…

Everything We’re Learning About Pluto and Its Moons RIGHT NOW

It’s been a crazy week learning about Pluto as the New Horizons spacecraft makes the first-ever close encounter with the dwarf planet. Join us as we live-blog the very first science results as the mission team reports back after closest approach. On Monday, we confirmed that Pluto really is the biggest dwarf planet and the…

Pluto Memes Are Taking Over the Internet

When the New Horizons spacecraft sent back its first clear image of everyone’s favorite dwarf planet, Pluto became a perfect storm of a meme. Historians in the future will wonder what we were smoking. An endless assortment of related memes can be found under #pluto hashtags across the social web. Pluto’s image was destined to…

These Pluto Truthers Insist NASA Images Are Fake

It wouldn’t be a monumental achievement in human history without some truthers on the internet calling it fake. And NASA’s historic Pluto flyby is no different. The conspiracy theory crowd has descended on the event as their too-good-to-be-true choice this week. Wake up sheeple! Pluto is just a dog at Disneyland! As just one example,…

The Worst Brand Tweets About the Pluto Flyby

When will be the next time that humanity will be able to snap some images of a never-before-photographed maybe-planet while sailing past it at eight miles per second? Probably never. So brands jumped at the opportunity to capitalize on this historic achievement. Updated with new awful tweets! Updated 7/15

Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert Geek Out Over Pluto

Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson are rightfully excited about the successful Pluto flyby of New Horizons. They’re so excited that they made a little video where Colbert brings his trademark layman curiosity to the proceedings (while also correcting Tyson on Pluto’s size and the temperature of the 9th circle of Hell). Here’s the full…

We Get the Best Space Images When Scientists Pull All-Nighters

Fifty years ago today, the Mariner 4 mission sent home the first images of Mars. Today, the New Horizons probe sent home gloriously detailed photos of Pluto. Despite the intervening decades, the vibrant excitement of the mission scientists staying up all night to see that first image is exactly the same. Colour-by-numbers chart for the…

The New Horizons Mission, From Pluto’s Point of View

IT’S ALIVE!!! New Horizons Phones Home After Pluto Flyby

Early this morning, NASA’s New Horizons probe made its closest approach to the Pluto-Charon system. Now after a full day of science and a long, long wait for the signal to reach Earth, we’ve received word that our daring (and darling!) probe is still alive. After its close approach to Pluto this morning, the inconsiderate…

Why It’ll Take New Horizons 16 Months to Send Us This Week’s Data

Early this morning, NASA rolled out the highest-resolution image of Pluto to date, taken 16 hours before today’s historic flyby. Tomorrow, we’ll receive a new set of images at a resolution ten times higher. And Pluto Christmas is just getting started, because it’s going to take NASA 16 full months to download all the data…

The Complete Story of the Pluto Flyby in 12 NASA Visuals 

Today we watched the Pluto flyby with New Horizons mission control via accurate-to-the-second visualizations and infographics. The results were glorious on the American Museum of Natural History’s IMAX screen. The New Horizons spacecraft is moving very, very fast: She is a beauty—compact yet complex, with named parts: What we’re looking at, via io9: New Horizons…

Places on Pluto are Being Named for Your Darkest Imaginings

Welcome to the excellently weird world of informal naming systems: here’s how we’re naming all the newly-discovered places on Pluto after Cthulhu, Balrog, Meng-p’o, and other dwellers from the underworld. When exploring a whole new world, it’s important to come up with a shared vocabulary for naming the new geography. As mission scientist and (“wow^wow”…

A New Horizons Update: What We Know While We Wait for it to Phone Home

New Horizons is past its closest approach and we’re awaiting its first call home. While we wait, NASA hosted a question-and-answer on what new data is being collected, when it will arrive at Earth, expected image resolutions, and initial impressions on what we’ve seen so far. Top image: Mission scientists, press, and Pluto enthusiasts celebrate…

Here’s What We Just Learned About Pluto

At a NASA briefing this afternoon, Alan Stern, New Horizon’s principal investigator, answered questions from the media and the public on today’s historic flyby, discussing the team’s latest impressions of Pluto’s surface, how the data is being transmitted back to Earth, and much, much more! Here are all the key answers we got. How fast…