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Visiting the San Diego SpaceUp Unconference
Posted by Mat Kaplan on 2012/02/14 08:38 CST
Emily Lakdawalla and I drove down to the 3rd annual San Diego SpaceUp Unconference on February 4. We had great fun hanging out with the other space geeks.
New Horizons Day 2: Liquids on Pluto's surface?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/13 01:27 CDT
Jeff Moore's presentation was cool because of the discussion it stimulated. He considered what exogenic processes might be operating on Pluto's surface. What's an exogenic process? It's something that modifies the shape of the surface from the outside, and doesn't require the body to be geologically active inside.
New Horizons Day 2: Tectonic features on icy worlds
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/09 01:05 CDT
New Horizons Day 2: Tectonic features on icy worlds
New Horizons workshop, day 1: Chemistry & climate on Pluto & other cold places
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/30 11:27 CDT
Today and tomorrow I'm attending the New Horizons Workshop on Icy Surface Processes. The first day was all about the composition of the surface and atmosphere of Pluto, Charon, Triton, and other distant places.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/07/20 01:38 CDT | 2 comments
That's right: Hubble observations have yielded the discovery of a third small body orbiting Pluto and Charon.
Posted by Meg Schwamb on 2011/05/25 08:30 CDT
The last decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of the solar system with the discovery of the largest Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of comparable size to Pluto.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/02 11:26 CDT
Space.com has taken advantage of the infinitely scrollable nature of Web pages to produce a really cool infographic on the scales of orbital distances in the solar system.
Pluto's atmosphere changes really fast!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/21 10:27 CDT
Pluto's atmosphere has been a subject of fascination for planetary astronomers since -- well, since astronomers first discovered that it had an atmosphere in the early '90s. The interest is partly because it's fascinating that such a distant and cold world is capable of supporting an atmosphere, and partly because the presence of the atmosphere confounds all attempts to measure Pluto's size precisely.
Posted by Charlene Anderson on 2011/02/25 03:25 CST
A Planetary Society trifecta -- that's what Neil Tyson calls this episode of his StarTalk radio show broadcast this week. His guests include the Society's Vice President, Heidi Hammel, and its Executive Director, Bill Nye, (along with the Society's friend, Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers).
New maps of Pluto show pretty amazing amounts of surface change
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/02/04 02:17 CST
I just posted my writeup of today's press briefing on a new map of Pluto produced from Hubble images. The main conclusion was that Pluto has shown an astonishing amount of changes across its surface between 1994 and 2002 -- more, in fact, than any other solid surface in the solar system.
Ted Stryk: Report from New Horizons science team meeting
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2010/01/19 07:55 CST
The New Horizons science team is meeting this week. Ted Stryk was invited to attend the meeting, and he sent the following notes from the first day.
Ever Plan Ahead? How About Six Years Ahead?
Posted by Alan Stern on 2009/05/19 07:05 CDT
Despite still being more than six years and just over 18 Astronomical Units from the Pluto system, the project team for New Horizons is conducting the second and final portion of our Pluto Encounter Preliminary Design Review (EPDR) tomorrow and the next day.
(Almost) everything you ever wanted to know about New Horizons and Pluto
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2005/12/20 05:56 CST
I was browsing around the Web today looking for material to improve the information we have on our site about Pluto, and discovered that the New Horizons mission has just posted their launch press kit.
An official pronouncement may be coming about the "what is a planet?" debate
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2005/09/21 02:28 CDT
Since the discovery of 2003 UB313, larger than Pluto, there's been a lively debate going on in many places about what makes a planet. There's now an article in Nature talking about a proposal that would address the controversy
Pluto: The Discovery of a Planet
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/18 11:00 CST
To mark the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the planet Pluto, The Planetary Society presents to its readers the remarkable story of the discovery.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 6: From Pluto to Sedna
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/17 11:00 CST
74 years after Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a faint dot on a pair of photographic plates, a modern group of astronomers made another remarkable discovery. On March 15, 2004, Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale announced the discovery of Sedna – the furthest object ever detected in the Solar System.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 5: The Aftermath
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/16 11:00 CST
The discovery of Planet X was announced to the world on March 13, 1930, which marked the anniversary of William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781 as well as Percival Lowell’s birthday. The observatory’s communiqué emphasized that the discovery was no coincidence, but the vindication of Lowell’s predictions made years before.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 4: Clyde's Search
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/15 11:00 CST
Since his teenage years Clyde Tombaugh had been an avid amateur astronomer and a gifted telescope builder. Based on instructions contained in an article from a boy’s Sunday school paper, he built a series of telescopes of increasing power and quality on the family farm.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 3: Planet X
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/14 11:00 CST
The discovery of Neptune accounted for nearly all the unexplained motions of the outer planets of the Solar System. Nevertheless, several astronomers insisted that some unexplained residual motions remained, pointing to the presence of a ninth planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 2: Out of the Six-Planet World
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/13 11:00 CST
Since humans first set their eyes to the stars, they noticed that a few of these bright objects behaved differently from the others. Whereas all the stars moved together, revolving around the Earth once every 24 hours, five appeared to move within the firmament among the other stars. Accordingly, they were named “planets,” meaning “wanderers” in Greek.
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