New Horizons – Sheila Crosby

Fun names on Pluto

August 26, 2015

Sorry for the hiatus: I got overtired and had a lurgy. Now that I have a bit of time and energy, I went to see what’s been happening with the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto. The space craft zipped by the dwarf planet over a month ago, but while it was passing, it was too busy taking photos and measurements to send much back to Earth. Then NASA and JPL…

New Horizons flies by Pluto

Enormous heart feature on Pluto. Credits: NASA/APL/SwRI

July 14, 2015

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Oh wow! Today the New Horizons spacecraft zipped past Pluto at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/hr), just 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. I was expecting something cool, but not a heart 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across. The heart is quie near Pluto’s equator (the photo mostly shows the northern hemisphere) and it seems remarkably flat. The best guess is that it’s geologically new, because much of the rest of…