This week, NASA has discovered great similarities between the Earth and Mars and Pluto. But when it comes to the potential for life, Mars is an increasingly hot favourite.
Charon has a huge fracture system, unlike anything seen on Pluto.
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
New Year’s resolutions are one thing. But what does it take to devote your life to a work goal with such a long time horizon you might never reach it in your lifetime?
In the long lead-up to our ultimate flyby of Pluto, space science has reconfigured our notions of what it means to be a solar system, a planet, a world.
What could be out there? That question eventually led to the discovery of Pluto.
ESO/L. Calçada
The existence of a “Planet X” in the outer solar system was the subject of great speculation, and was finally settled with the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
Music and astronomy have been intimately linked since antiquity.
AAP Image/ NASA
From Twinkle Twinkle to Space Odyssey and beyond, humans have always turned to music to help deal with the profoundly confronting enormity of the cosmos. Is that a match made in the heavens?
Pluto’s newly clear topography.
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Scott Kenyon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Photos from the spacecraft’s close approach are dazzling. They and other data from the mission will fill in some of the blanks about Pluto and provide a snapshot of the infant solar system.
New Horizons mission members have worked on the project for even longer than it’s taken the spacecraft to get to Pluto. They’ve planned, built and researched – and now their efforts are paying off.
Now the flypast of Pluto is over the space probe New Horizons will begin sending the data back to Earth. It will take many months but what will it reveal about the dwarf planet?
Preparation of Mariner 4 before its fly-by of Mars, exactly 50 years ago.
NASA/JPL
After a decade in space, New Horizons has finally completed its fly-by of Pluto. And the fact that it is no longer a planet makes it all the more interesting.
The last photo sent to Earth by New Horizons before its flyby, and arguably the ‘textbook’ photo of the planet for the next few decades.
NASA