We are pleased to provide comprehensive multimedia resources to support your New Horizons reporting process. Please find and use the following resources in our digital media kit: articles, biographies, video, high-resolution photography for print and online purposes, and background information.
In addition to these resources, interviews with Planetary Society spokespeople are available upon request. To schedule an interview, or to be added to our media mailing list, please contact our Director of Communications Erin Greeson at erin.greeson@planetary.org or +1-626-793-5100.
All press materials are provided by The Planetary Society, unless otherwise credited.
Press Releases/Media Alerts
Bill Nye and The Planetary Society Celebrate New Horizons Pluto Flyby (July 13, 2015)
Nearly ten years after its launch, the New Horizons spacecraft will reach its closest encounter with Pluto on July 14, 2015. NASA and the world science community will celebrate the landmark at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University, as well as at “PlutoPalooza” events around the world.
Flyby Schedule
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla
Three months ago, I posted an article explaining what to expect during the flyby. This is a revised version of the same post, with some errors corrected, the expected sizes of Nix and Hydra updated, and times of press briefings added.
Latest Articles
The round worlds in the solar system: An updated graphic
Emily Lakdawalla • November 02, 2015
I have a newly updated scale comparison graphic to share: all the round worlds in the solar system smaller than 10,000 kilometers in diameter, now with added Pluto, Charon, and Ceres.
Charon in 3D
Emily Lakdawalla • October 13, 2015
Last week, the pile of New Horizons LORRI camera raw image releases included nine frames from a high-resolution mosaic on Charon. Together with the color MVIC view, they make a 3D global photo of Pluto's moon. Other recently released goodies include a global backlit color image of Pluto and the first image that resolves the tiny moon Styx.
New Horizons releases new color pictures of Charon, high-resolution lookback photo of Pluto
Emily Lakdawalla • October 02, 2015
Now that New Horizons is regularly sending back data, the mission is settling into a routine of releasing a set of captioned images on Thursdays, followed by raw LORRI images on Friday. The Thursday releases give us the opportunity to see lovely color data from the spacecraft's Ralph MVIC instrument. This week, the newly available color data set covered Charon.
Mission History & Advocacy
Pushing Back the Frontier: How The Planetary Society Helped Send a Spacecraft to Pluto
Posted by Jason Davis
It took 16 years and five spacecraft designs to get a mission to Pluto. The Planetary Society was there through it all, always striving to help NASA push back our solar system's frontier.
New Horizons is a Triumph for Space Advocates
Posted by Casey Dreier
New Horizons—what will be NASA’s greatest success of 2015—was cancelled multiple times in its early life, and many times before that in its previous incarnations. A mission to Pluto was not inevitable, despite the overwhelming scientific and public excitement.
Staff Biographies
Casey Dreier
Casey is the public face of The Planetary Society's efforts to advance planetary exploration, planetary defense, and the search for life. He is a trusted expert in space policy and works to demystify the political and policy processes behind space exploration.Emily Lakdawalla
Emily Lakdawalla is an internationally admired science communicator and educator, passionate about advancing public understanding of space and sharing the wonder of scientific discovery.Bill Nye
Bill Nye isn't just the Science Guy—he's a Planetary Society charter member and has been The Planetary Society's CEO since 2010.High Resolution Images
Image usage policy: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. For additional publication permissions, please contact us. Click thumbnails to enlarge.
Bill Nye
F. Scott Schafer
Bill Nye
F. Scott Schafer
Bill Nye
F. Scott Schafer
Bill Nye
F. Scott Schafer
Recent Images
Image usage policy: As noted on each image page. For additional publication permissions, please contact us.
Pluto’' moon Nix, half illuminated
This recently received panchromatic image of Pluto’s small satellite Nix taken by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) aboard New Horizons is one of the best images of Pluto’s third-largest moon generated by the NASA mission. Taken on July 14, 2015 at a range of about 23,000 kilometers from Nix, the illuminated surface is about 19 kilometers by 47 kilometers. The unique perspective of this image provides new details about Nix’s geologic history and impact record.
Zigzagging across Pluto
This high-resolution swath of Pluto sweeps over the cratered plains at the west of the New Horizons’ encounter hemisphere and across numerous prominent faults, skimming the eastern margin of the dark, forbidding region informally known as Cthulhu Regio, and finally passing over the mysterious, possibly cryovolcanic edifice Wright Mons, before reaching the terminator or day-night line. Among the many notable details shown are the overlapping and infilling relationships between units of the relatively smooth, bright volatile ices from Sputnik Planum (at the edge of the mosaic) and the dark edge or “shore” of Cthulhu. The pictures in this mosaic were taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) in “ride-along” mode with the LEISA spectrometer, which accounts for the ‘zigzag’ or step pattern. Taken shortly before New Horizons’ July 14, 2015 closest approach to Pluto, details as small as 500 meters can be seen. (NOTE: Click on the image and ZOOM IN for optimal viewing.)
Color portrait of 2014 MU69
Color from a more distant observation has been combined with New Horizons' best images of 2014 MU69 to create this view.
Highest-resolution portrait of 2014 MU69
This photo is a stack of 9 of the most detailed images that New Horizons took of 2014 MU69 just minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach. The images were taken 6.5 minutes before closest approach, on 1 January at 5:26 UT, when the spacecraft was 6,628 kilometers from MU69 and 6.6 billion kilometers from Earth.
Video
Credit: The Planetary Society
