Planetary Science – Page 23

Video: The New Horizons team hold news conference after flyby declared a success

January 1, 2019 Spaceflight Now

Watch as the New Horizons team hold a press conference an hour after they received confirmation that the spacecraft had successfully flown by Ultima Thule and had recorded the expected amount of science data.

New Horizons scientists elated as Ultima Thule’s shape comes into view

January 1, 2019 Stephen Clark

A fresh image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft released Tuesday showed the mission’s distant flyby target a billion miles beyond Pluto — nicknamed Ultima Thule — has an elongated shape like that of a peanut shell or a bowling pin, and the prospect of higher-resolution pictures arriving on Earth later in the day had scientists salivating for more.

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.