On July 14 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at Pluto after a nine and a half year journey. It was launched on January 19, 2006 and will be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto. New Horizons will give us our first close-up views of the dwarf planet and its moons. Continue reading
With President Barack Obama proposing a relatively flat budget for NASA in 2013, a group professional astronomers is urging the White House and Congress to find a better balance between the space agency’s planetary science and exploration needs. Continue reading
Just as an expert chess player sacrifices a piece to protect the queen, the solar system may have given up a giant planet and spared Earth, according to an article recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Continue reading
The following is a huge infographic showing the true scale of the solar system with all its planets, minor bodies and the most famous probes we have sent out into deep space. Scientists measure distances in our solar system in … Continue reading
The Hartley 2 comet has made it to the news recently: first because of the comet’s flyby near Earth and then due to it being visited by the Deep Impact spacecraft. The comet is commonly known as Hartley 2, but … Continue reading