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Report from the 2011 New Horizons Science Team Meeting
Posted by Ted Stryk on 2011/01/24 01:01 CST
The annual New Horizons Science Team Meeting was held last week at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/11 01:49 CST | 1 comments
As part of a big, ongoing project to make a comparison chart of the dimensions and physical properties of solar system objects I've spent the morning tackling the difficult problem of summarizing the physical characteristics of the biggest things that are out there beyond Neptune.
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.
(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.
A moon for the "10th planet," 2003 UB313
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2005/10/02 07:30 CDT
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.
The Discovery of a Planet, Part 1: The Blinking Image
Posted by Amir Alexander on 2005/02/12 11:00 CST
February 18, 1930, was a cloudy day at the Lowell Observatory, on top of Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona. 22 year old Clyde Tombaugh was hard at work, peering through the lens of an ancient-looking brass-colored device. The instrument, known as a “blink comparator,” mounted two large photographic plates.
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