New Horizons Stories

A four-panel image. The top two panels are diagrams of Uranus – spheres with gridlines going longitudinally and latitudinally. On the top left, the view from Hubble, the southern pole of the planet faces 3 o’clock. On the top right, the view from New Horizons, the southern pole faces 10 o’clock. The bottom left panel is Hubble’s actual view of Uranus – the planet is a light blue sphere, with a white circle covering the right half of the planet (the southern pole). The bottom right panel is the actual view of Uranus from New Horizons. The planet appears as a tiny whiteish dot.

NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus

6 min read

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of…

Article4 weeks ago

NASA’s New Horizons Detects Dusty Hints of Extended Kuiper Belt

4 min read

New observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt – the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks – might stretch much farther out than…

Article9 months ago

NASA’s New Horizons to Continue Exploring Outer Solar System

3 min read

NASA has announced an updated plan to continue New Horizons’ mission of exploration of the outer solar system.  Beginning in fiscal year 2025, New Horizons will focus on gathering unique heliophysics data, which can be readily obtained during an extended,…

Article1 year ago

All Eyes on the Ice Giants

3 min read

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus and Neptune from its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and the mission team is inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come along for the ride –…

Article1 year ago
Arrokoth looks like two reddish pancakes that merged into a peanut shape.

New Horizons Team Discusses Discoveries from the Kuiper Belt

1 min read

New Horizons continues to shed light on the mysterious planets and smaller bodies of the outer solar system.

Article2 years ago

New Horizons Team Adds AI Smarts to Its Kuiper Belt Object Search

4 min read

By early 1930, Lowell Observatory junior astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had spent months poring over hundreds of telescopic photo plates in the search for a single moving object – which would turn out to be Pluto, the ninth planet.  Nearly a…

Article2 years ago

New Horizons Team Adds AI Smarts to Its Kuiper Belt Object Search

4 min read

By early 1930, Lowell Observatory junior astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had spent months poring over hundreds of telescopic photo plates in the search for a single moving object – which would turn out to be Pluto, the ninth planet.

Article2 years ago

Update: NASA Extends Exploration for 8 Planetary Science Missions

7 min read

Editor’s Note: On May 26, 2022 NASA’s New Horizons mission’s second extended mission proposal was approved for implementation. In the two-year extended mission, New Horizons will conduct multi-disciplinary observations contributing to important science for NASA’s Planetary Science, Heliophysics and Astrophysics…

Article3 years ago

Using “Charon-light,” Researchers Image Pluto’s Dark Side in Faint Moonlight

5 min read

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made history by returning the first close-up images of Pluto and its moons. Now, through a series of clever methods, researchers led by Tod Lauer of the National Science Foundation’s National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Lab…

Article3 years ago

Pluto Landmarks Named for Aviation Pioneers Sally Ride and Bessie Coleman

5 min read

More than 60 years after Bessie Coleman broke the bonds of terra firma to become the first African American woman and Native American to earn a pilot’s license, Sally Ride blasted off aboard shuttle Challenger to become the first American woman in…

Article3 years ago