New Frontiers – Page 3 – Spaceflight Now

New Horizons phones home, confirms successful flyby

January 1, 2019 William Harwood

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft raced past a frozen remnant of the solar system’s birth early New Year’s Day, phoned home to confirm a successful flyby and readied a treasure trove of pictures and other data for transmission back to eager scientists some 4.1 billion miles away.

Video: Queen guitarist Brian May discusses his song celebrating Ultima Thule flyby

January 1, 2019 Stephen Clark

Queen guitarist and contributing New Horizons scientist Brian May wrote a song celebrating the spacecraft’s New Year’s flyby with Ultima Thule, a supposed block of ice and rock in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Video: New Horizons phone home will confirm health of spacecraft

January 1, 2019 Spaceflight Now

New Horizons Mission Operations Manager (MOM) Alice Bowman describes how New Horizons will turn to Earth and ‘phone home’ to confirm if the flyby of Ultima Thule was a success.

Early image of Ultima Thule revealed, providing hints on its shape

January 1, 2019 Spaceflight Now

John Spencer, the New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist, reveals the first multi-pixel image of Ultima Thule which provide hints at its shape during a news conference at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

OSIRIS-REx completes New Year’s Eve orbit insertion burn at asteroid

December 31, 2018 Stephen Clark

After four weeks of navigating in the vicinity of asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft fired its thrusters for eight seconds Monday to slip into orbit around the carbon-rich object, making Bennu the smallest planetary body ever orbited by a spacecraft.

Video: Marc Buie, New Horizons Occultation Team Lead (members only)

December 31, 2018 Spaceflight Now

Marc Buie, Occultation Team Lead, reveals what we know so far about the shape of Ultima Thule as New Horizons races towards its encounter with the Kuiper Belt object.

On eve of New Horizons flyby, Ultima Thule still holding onto its mysteries

December 30, 2018 Stephen Clark

A day before NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft closes in on a frozen outpost nicknamed Ultima Thule 4.1 billion miles from Earth, basic facts about the city-sized object continued to elude scientists Sunday as the ground team braced for a deluge of data and imagery that should unmask the unexplored world at the frontier of the solar system.

Video: Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager, previews Ultima Thule flyby (members only)

December 30, 2018 Stephen Clark

New Horizons’s mission operations manager Alice Bowman previews the spacecraft’s New Year’s Day encounter with Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt, a distant zone of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Live coverage: New Horizons flyby target comes into focus

December 30, 2018 Stephen Clark

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a historic New Year’s encounter with an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. The NASA space probe passed Ultima Thule at a distance of around 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) on Jan. 1, making it the most distant planetary body ever explored up close.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft heads for New Year’s encounter with distant world

December 28, 2018 William Harwood

Three years and a billion miles past Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons probe is on the verge of at least one more pioneering, once-in-a-lifetime milestone: a New Year’s Day flyby of a small body known as 2014 MU69, unofficially dubbed Ultima Thule — “beyond the known world” — in a NASA naming contest.