Tag: Planetary Science
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Video: Queen guitarist Brian May discusses his song celebrating Ultima Thule flyby
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. May is expected to release the track shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day at the Johns Hopkins…
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Early image of Ultima Thule revealed, providing hints on its shape
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.
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Video: New Horizons phone home will confirm health of spacecraft
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.
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New Horizons phones home, confirms successful flyby
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, center, celebrates with school children at the moment the spacecraft was planned to reach its closest approach to Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT) Jan. 1. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls NASA’s New Horizons…
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Video: The New Horizons team hold news conference after flyby declared a success
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.
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OSIRIS-REx completes New Year’s Eve orbit insertion burn at asteroid
This mosaic image of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on Dec. 2 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 15 miles (24 kilometers). Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona 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…
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On eve of New Horizons flyby, Ultima Thule still holding onto its mysteries
This image shows the first detection of 2014 MU69 (nicknamed “Ultima Thule”), using the highest resolution mode (known as “1×1”) of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. Three separate images, each with an exposure time of 0.5 seconds, were combined to produce the image shown here. All three images were…
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Live coverage: New Horizons flyby target comes into focus
Live coverage of the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of 2014 MU69 — also known as Ultima Thule — in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
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NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft heads for New Year’s encounter with distant world
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist’s concept of the New Horizons spacecraft approaching a Kuiper Belt Object. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI 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…
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NASA picks Jezero Crater landing site for next Mars rover
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Examination of spectral data acquired from orbit show that some of these sediments have minerals that indicate chemical alteration by water. Here in Jezero Crater delta, sediments contain clays and carbonates.…