nasa’s new horizons, new discoveries, new horizons spacecraft, space exploration

New Horizons Spacecraft Answers Question: How Dark Is Space?

How dark is space? If you get away from city lights and look up, the sky between the stars appears very dark indeed. Above the Earth’s atmosphere, outer space dims even further, fading to an inky pitch-black. And yet even there, space isn’t absolutely black. The universe has a suffused feeble glimmer from innumerable distant stars and ...

Troy Oakes

Galaxies in the universe.

A Beating Heart, Liquid Ocean, and Other Mysteries of Icy Pluto

Five years ago, NASA’s New Horizons flyby returned with up-close photos of Pluto. They were the first we’d seen of the dwarf planet that are non-pixelated. Pluto has been an enigma since its discovery in 1930, but seeing it up close gave rise to more questions than answers. Far from what scientists imagined, the mysteries ...

Armin Auctor

Pluto.

New Horizons Team Publishes First Kuiper Belt Flyby Science Results

NASA’s New Horizons mission team has published the first profile of the farthest world ever explored, a planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69. Analyzing just the first sets of data gathered during the New Horizons spacecraft’s New Year’s 2019 flyby of MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule), the mission team quickly discovered an ...

Troy Oakes

Ultima Thule.