After last summer’s Pluto flyby, the New Horizons spacecraft started sending data back to Earth – at 2 kilobits per second. Here’s some of what scientists have learned so far from that rich, slow cache.
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.
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.
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?
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.