Tag: Pluto

27 SEP

Weird ‘ice blades’ on Pluto finally cracked by NASA (PHOTOS)

Published time: 27 Sep, 2017 13:01 Perplexing sword-like columns of space ice that rise up through Pluto’s Tartarus Dorsa mountains may finally have been explained by NASA – two years after the weird formations were first observed in detail. The ‘ice blades’ are the result of solid methane ‘evaporation,’ an erosion process similar to that […]

16 JUL

NASA celebrates anniversary of Pluto mission with stunning flyover movie (VIDEO)

Published time: 16 Jul, 2017 19:55 NASA has created a stunning flyover video of Pluto, two years after the New Horizons mission sent its historic images of the planet back to Earth. The probe captured the first-ever close-up pictures after coming within 7,800 miles (12,550km) of the dwarf planet back in July 2015, providing us […]

27 MAR

‘Farewell to Pluto’: NASA release stunning high-res image of dwarf planet (PHOTO)

Published time: 27 Mar, 2017 18:06Edited time: 27 Mar, 2017 18:07 NASA has released its highest-resolution color image of Pluto, showing the dwarf planet dramatically backlit by the sun. The receding crescent was snapped by the New Horizon Spacecraft as it traveled some 120,000 miles (200,000 km) from Pluto. Somewhat confusingly, the space agency dubbed […]

25 MAR

This blue-sky image of Pluto is absolutely stunning

Enlarge / New Horizons’ high-resolution farewell to Pluto. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University APL/Southwest Research Institute) Even though all of the New Horizons spacecraft data taken during its 2015 flyby of Pluto has been downloaded to Earth for months, scientists are still piecing it all together. Now two scientists, Tod Lauer and Alex Parker, have processed some […]

20 MAR

Pluto may be a planet again if these astronomers get their way — and Earth’s moon, too

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Pluto’s status as a non-planet may be coming to an end. Professor Mike Brown of Caltech ended Pluto’s planetary status in 2006. But now, Kirby Runyon, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, thinks it’s time to cancel that demotion and restore it as our Solar System’s ninth planet. Pluto’s rebirth as a planet […]

20 FEB

NASA Scientists Have a Plan to Make Pluto a Planet Again

Image: NASA/New Horizons “It’s bullshit,” Alan Stern, principle investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, has said about the demotion of Pluto from the ranks of official planet status. Now Stern is heading up a team of NASA scientists who have proposed a new definition of planets that would do more than just reinstate […]