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22 October 2D3B: After a journey of over a billion miles to the outer solar system, the Centaurus spacecraft is on final approach. Dead ahead lies Chiron a mini-planet orbiting [...]

THE EXPLORATION OF PLUTO WASN'T EASY, BUT IT SURE WAS WORTH IT. As David Grinspoon and I recount in our book, Chasing New Horizons, it took 14 years (1989 to [...]

NEW HORIZONS is NASA's Pluto and Kuiper Belt exploration spacecraft. After a four-year-long development, the sophisticated probe was launched in January 2006. In 2015, New Horizons conducted the first close-up [...]

The exploration of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft revolutionized our knowledge of this small planet and its system of five moons. But it also did much more. The encounter [...]

Last summer, NASA's New Horizons mission successfully and spectacularly completed the first exploration of the Pluto system. In just a W matter of weeks, Pluto went from a point of [...]

After an epic 9.5-year journey across 3 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft culminated a six-month encounter with Pluto and its system of [...]

This July, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will complete the historic first reconnaissance of the Pluto system--and with it, the first exploration of a Kuiper Belt planet and its attendant moons. [...]

Fasten your seat belts--the long-anticipated flyby of the Pluto system by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is just around the corner. By the time you read these words, New Horizons will [...]

In early 2017, the two of us, along with a few others, refreshed the debate on the definition of planet in scientific nomenclature. The International Astronomical Union's (IAU) historic definitional [...]

March 29, 1997. White Sands, New Mexico. On liftoff, a 53-foot-tall rocket called a Black Brant leaps from its launch pad with an acceleration of over 19 Gs. In less [...]

We know interstellar comets exist, but astronomers have never seen one -- yet. Remember those old, silent Keystone Cops movies of a busy 1920s downtown intersection, brimming with cars, kids, [...]

It's almost Christmas, but the workload on-orbit is just as intense as usual: materials processing, medical experiments, observations of Earth. But for the three American astronauts aboard the space station, [...]

GLO:ast/01dec19:20n1.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): A proposed Pluto orbiter, seen here flying above the canyon system that dominates the planet's large moon, Charon, could explore the Pluto system for at least two years. gl Pluto's largest moon, Charon, also revealed a puzzlingly reflective surface and neverbefore- seen dark polar caps seemingly made of methane that had escaped from Pluto's atmosphere. The resulting two-year tour of the Pluto system begins with a Charon gravity assist and a braking maneuver to complete the Pluto orbit injection. Because that breaks the tug of war between going wide in studying other dwarf planets and going deep in Pluto studies, we dubbed the resultant all-inone concept the "Gold Standard" Pluto- Kuiper Belt exploration mission. [Extracted from the article]

Q: Has New Horizons taken any pictures of Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune?--Sarah Fernandez, Spring Hill, Tennessee A New Horizons--NASA's space* craft mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt--has not taken [...]

On the afternoon of February 18, 1930, 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh made the discovery of a lifetime. The Lowell Observatory astronomer was comparing two photographic plates taken the previous month when [...]

From January to June, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, on a fast track to Pluto, probed Jupiter and its surroundings with seven miniaturized scientific instruments. The craft conducted more than 700 [...]

New Horizons--the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt--rocketed into space January 19, 2006. Now, just over a year into its flight, the spacecraft nears Jupiter, where the giant [...]

Since Charon's discovery in 1978, the world had viewed distant planet Pluto as the 'Pluto-Charon binary.' Now, with our team's discovery last year of Pluto's two small moons, we know [...]

Astronomers study comets for the promise of looking at well-preserved relics from the outer solar system's formation days. However, the original theories of comets as completely pristine samples have changed [...]

The discovery that planets around other stars are common will forever stand as one of the great achievements of astronomy in the 1990s. As a working astronomer, this discovery came [...]

The article offers information on the observations by National Aeronautics and Space Administration's New Horizons spacecraft on the Kuiper Belt object (KBO). Topics discussed include the first discovered KBO in 1992 by David Jewitt and Jane Luu; the first Planetary Decadal Survey chaired by Michael Belto, aimed to explore the Pluto system and KBOs; and the discovery of Ultima Thule which turned out to be a contact binary created by gentle merging of two like sized bodies.

Walter Baade: A Life in Astrophysics Donald E. Osterbrock, 270 pages, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2001; ISBN 0-691-04936-X; hardcover, $29.95. The German-American observational astronomer Walter Baade (1893-1960) was [...]

For many decades after its discovery, Pluto appeared to be a misfit. A tiny spit of a planet with a moon nearly half its own size, this rogue world seemed [...]

The article reports that on January 1, 2019 the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Pluto and Kuiper Belt exploration spacecraft will fly past a distant, enigmatic world left over from the solar system. It mentions that New Horizons team designed and built the spacecraft. It also mentions that discovery of the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s transformed the understanding of solar system.

The article focuses on the planet Pluto explored by the U.S. National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) New Horizons spacecraft. Topics include the planet having four small moons, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx which are as old as the planet, features within the nitrogen glacier Sputnik Planitia (SP) forming the western lobe such as recharge zones and glacial flow; and temporal changes on the planet's surface the ice moves sliding under some of the mountains SP abuts.

Q: Is there evidence of Oort-Cloud-like structures around other stars?--Laurence Rohr, Warrenville, Illinois A: For more than 20 years, scientists have speculated whether structures of small orbiting bodies, like the [...]

Few people have entire regions of the solar system named after them, but then few people contributed as much to planetary astronomy as Gerard Kuiper. That's what he was called [...]

Q WHAT CAUSES THE FORMATION OF SPIRAL ARMS IN GALAXIES? NASA, ESA, AND M. CHIABERGE (STSCI/ESA) gl A Located 8 billion light-years away, the galaxy 3C186 is home to an extremely bright galactic nucleus - the signature of an active supermassive black hole (SMBH). A galaxy is held together by the collective mass of its stars, gas, and dark matter, and any gravitational effects of the central SMBH are negligible with respect to that of the whole galaxy. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses how the discovery that planets around other stars are common will forever stand as one of the great achievements of astronomy in the 1990s. Given the run-of-the-mill nature of the Sun, I'd expected that the processes that led to the formation of planets in our solar system would naturally operate in other locales. What did surprise [and please] me, however, was learning that other solar systems would exhibit many exotic architectures. In our own solar system, we know the Sun is about halfway through its 12-billion-year "main sequence" phase. This phase will end when the Sun exhausts its supply of usable hydrogen fuel. To calculate what will happen to the outer solar system when the Sun goes red giant, we need to know the Sun's predicted mass, size, and luminosity over time. We also need a mathematical recipe for calculating planetary temperatures using several variables, including the planet's distance from the Sun, the Sun's luminosity, and the planet's properties. Information on the Sun's luminosity evolution is published in scientific literature. It's based on stellar evolution calculations that involve such criteria as nuclear fusion rates that control the rate of energy generation in the Sun's core, and the response of the Sun's outer layers to those internal processes. We can use luminosity projections of the red giant Sun to calculate the approximate surface temperature of planets around the Sun [or another star] knowing only the distance of the planet from its star and the reflectivity of the planet. For a common star like the Sun, the room temperature distance moves outward late in life from the 1 astronomical unit [AU] distance we known and love here on Earth to as far as 50 AU. Similar, but more extreme, behavior is exhibited in stars with higher masses. But the basic message remains unchanged: The habitable zone around each star will move outward as the star gets older, moving from the inner to the outer solar system.

The article provides observations about the possibility of Vulcanoids, asteroids inside Mercury's orbit which help to provide information about the history of the solar system. Some 19th-century astronomers thought they had spied Vulcan, named after the Roman god of fire and metallurgy, near the Sun during total solar eclipses. But photographic searches early in the 20th century firmly disproved the existence of Vulcan, which was purported to be a body hundreds or thousands of miles across. By contrast, the Vulcanoids -- a repeatedly hypothesized population of small asteroids only a few miles in diameter -- might really exist. Vulcanoids could offer vital insights into the bombardment history of the inner solar system and the composition of the solar nebula. The Vulcanoids would lie in the stable zone between 0.08 and 0.21 AU from the Sun. Solar radiation would create a drag on small objects located any closer, causing them to spiral into the Sun. The region beyond 0.2I AU would be swept clean by gravitational perturbations induced by Mercury.

The article presents answers to questions on topics concerning Cepheid variable stars and astronomical distance, how astronomers can predict meteor showers, and ways in which professional observatories can prevent dew on mirrors and lenses.

Reports that European and American scientists preparing for the joint European Space Agency/National Aeronautics Space Administration Rosetta mission held a workshop in December 1997 in Naples, Italy. Information on the Rosetta mission; Facts about the Wirtanen comet in the workshop.

Offers a look on the conference held by astronomer in Canary Island to tackle issues regarding Comet HaleBopp. Findings of Zdenek Sekanina on the comet with the use of Hubble Space Telescope; Conclusions of Sekanina; Comments from astronomers.