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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft aimed to get up-close and personal with Pluto on Tuesday, on track to zoom within 7,800 miles of the small icy world left unexplored until now. It’s the final destination on NASA’s planetary tour of the solar system, which began more than a half-century ago. Pluto was still a full-fledged planet when New Horizons rocketed away in 2006, only to become demoted to dwarf status later that year. The 3 billion-mile journey from Cape Canaveral, Florida, culminates Tuesday at 7:49 a.m. EDT. That’s when the spacecraft is due to fly past Pluto...

LAUREL, Md. — With less than a day to go before NASA's New Horizons mission zooms past Pluto, scientists reported on Monday that the dwarf planet isn't quite as dwarfish as they thought — in fact, it's the largest known solar system object beyond Neptune. How large? Based on New Horizons imagery, its diameter is 2,370 kilometers (1,473 miles), plus or minus 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). That makes it almost 30 miles wider than Eris, the dwarf planet whose discovery led to Pluto's downfall as the "ninth planet" back in 2006. Eris' diameter has been measured to be 2,326 kilometers...

July 13, 2015 How Big Is Pluto? New Horizons Settles Decades-Long Debate A portrait from the final approach. Pluto and Charon display striking color and brightness contrast in this composite image from July 11, showing high-resolution black-and-white LORRI images colorized with Ralph data collected from the last rotation of Pluto. Color data being returned by the spacecraft now will update these images, bringing color contrast into sharper focus. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI Pluto’s bright, mysterious “heart” is rotating into view, ready for its close-up on close approach, in this image taken by New Horizons on July 12 from a distance of...

Published on Jul 13, 2015 New Horizons is flying by Pluto on Tuesday, July 14! But we won't hear a word from it... This is Pluto in a Minute. After nine and a half years and 3.26 billion miles, New Horizons is finally making its closest flyby of Pluto tomorrow, on Tuesday July 14, but, the spacecraft will be silent all day. Because, of all the moving part on New Horizons, the antenna is not one of them. The New Horizons spacecraft features a large dish antenna, and when its facing the Earth it can do one of two things:...

July 11, 2015Pluto by Moonlight In this artist’s rendering, Pluto’s largest moon Charon rises over the frozen surface of Pluto, casting a faint silvery luminescence across the distant planetary landscape. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute It’s Antarctic winter on Pluto. The sun has not been visible for twenty years in this frigid south polar region; it will not shine again for another 80 years. The only source of natural light is starlight and moonlight from Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. On July 14, New Horizons mission scientists will soon obtain the first images of the night region...

Edging within 7,800 miles of its surface at 7:49 a.m. EDT, the spacecraft’s long-range telescopic camera will resolve features as small as 230 feet (70 meters). Fourteen minutes later, it will zip within 17,930 miles of Charon as well as image Pluto’s four smaller satellites — Hydra, Styx, Nix and Kerberos. Graphic showing New Horizons’ busy schedule before and during the flyby. Credit: NASA fter zooming past, the craft will turn to photograph Pluto eclipsing the Sun as it looks for the faint glow of rings or dust sheets illuminated by backlight. At the same time, sunlight reflecting off Charon...

Take a good look at the latest picture of Pluto because it shows the face of the dwarf planet that will not be seen during next week's historic flyby. The US space agency's New Horizons probe was less than 2.5 million km from the diminutive world on Saturday and closing in fast. Come Tuesday, it will be grabbing shots from an altitude of just 12,500km. But the newly published image, showing Pluto's "spots", is of the hemisphere that will soon rotate out of view. It will not be seen again until after New Horizons has gone behind the 2,300km-wide dwarf,...

Explanation: Pluto is coming into focus. As the robotic New Horizons spacecraft bears down on this unexplored world of the distant Solar System, new features on its surface are becoming evident. In the displayed image taken last Thursday and released yesterday, an unusual polygonal structure roughly 200 kilometers wide is visible on the left, while just below it relatively complex terrain runs diagonally across the dwarf planet. New Horizon's images and data on these structures will likely be studied for years to come in an effort to better understand the geologic history of Pluto and our Solar System. After suffering...

Scientists Simulate the Space Environment During NASA's New Horizons Flyby Watch simulation here The black lines in this movie show clouds of solar material – called coronal mass ejections or CMEs – on their months-long journey from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system. The simulation helps show what space environment NASA's New Horizons mission might experience during its flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Credits: NASA\Odstricil When destined to stay close to Earth, spacecraft often must withstand the hazards of our space environment. They can be exposed to regular radiation showers from the sun and...

New Mexico Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alan Webber has a history of radical views, including ties to the Weather Underground and urging empathy for a child sex offender. Webber has raised the most money of Democratic candidates vying to challenge Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, and is competing against four other Democrats, including Lawrence Rael, who exaggerated his resume on his campaign website. The primary will be held on June 3. Mark Rudd, a leader and founder of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, which has advocated for the violent overthrow of the United States and committed multiple bombings of public...

The brain hidden inside the oldest known Old World monkey skull has been visualized for the first time. The creature’s tiny but remarkably wrinkled brain supports the idea that brain complexity can evolve before brain size in the primate family tree. The ancient monkey, known scientifically as Victoriapithecus, first made headlines in 1997 when its fossilized skull was discovered on an island in Kenya’s Lake Victoria, where it lived 15 million years ago. Now, thanks to high-resolution X-ray imaging, researchers have peered inside its cranial cavity and created a three-dimensional computer model of what the animal’s brain likely looked like....

The Huge Heart of Pluto Pluto’s “Heart” is seen in this new image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) received on July 8, 2015 after normal science operations resumed following the scary July 4 safe mode anomaly that briefing shut down all science operations. It shows ‘the heart and the whale’ along Pluto’s equator. The LORRI image has been combined with lower-resolution color information from the Ralph instrument. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI Emotions are rising exponentially with the rousing revelation that Pluto has a huge ‘Heart’ as revealed in stunning new imagery received just today (July 8) from NASA’s...

Explanation: An image snapped on July 7 by the New Horizons spacecraft while just under 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) from Pluto is combined with color data in this most detailed view yet of the Solar System's most famous world about to be explored. The region imaged includes the tip of an elongated dark area along Pluto's equator already dubbed "the whale". A bright heart-shaped region on the right is about 1,200 miles (2,000) kilometers across, possibly covered with a frost of frozen methane, nitrogen, and/or carbon monoxide. The view is centered near the area that will be seen...

New Horizons Map of Pluto: The Whale and the Donut This map of Pluto, made from images taken by the LORRI instrument aboard New Horizons, shows a wide array of bright and dark markings of varying sizes and shapes. Perhaps most intriguing is the fact that all of the darkest material on the surface lies along Pluto’s equator. The color version was created from lower-resolution color data from the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument. Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI This is the latest map of Pluto created from images taken from June 27 to July 3 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New...

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<p>In a few days, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the former ninth planet, the first up-closelook of the icy world in the outer solar system.</p> <p>The pictures coming back from Pluto are still a bit fuzzy. But just wait.</p>

The recovery from a July 4 anomaly that sent the New Horizons spacecraft into safe mode is proceeding according to plan, with the mission team preparing to return to normal science operations on time July 7. Mission managers reported during a July 6 media teleconference that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft resumed operations on its main computer overnight. The sequence of commands for the Pluto flyby have now been uplinked to the spacecraft, and full, as planned science observations of Pluto, its moons and the solar winds will resume at 12:34 p.m. EDT July 7. The quick response to the weekend...

A stunning teaser for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto will leave you brimming with anticipation. A new video has been released to promote NASA’s New Horizons mission. *SNIP* The video was commissioned by the National Space Society in honor of the highly anticipated arrival of NASA’s New Horizons probe at Pluto this summer. *SNIP* WATCH: Wanderers:A Stunning Vision Of Humanity's Future In Space Narrated By Carl Sagan The short YouTube video takes you on a tour of the solar system, flying by all the planets we’ve already visited leading up to the one world no spacecraft has yet...

It was the end of the road for a Casanova who has swindled about 20 women of their money and jewellery when he was arrested by police. The 34-year-old man was believed to have been involved in 20 fraud cases amounting to about RM155,000 (S$55,000). [US$40,600] Identifying himself as Aidid Iskandar, Afzan Iskandar and Hafis, the man would approach his victims on Facebook and sweet-talk them into believing he was sincere. The father-of-three is said to have cheated about 20 women between the ages of 28 and 38 of their cash and jewellery in two years. Brickfields police chief Asst...

It’s now just exactly one week before the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a fast flyby encounter of the ever intriguing binary planet, And the great news could not come soon enough given the proximity of the flyby. “The spacecraft is in excellent health and back in operation. New Horizons is barreling towards the Pluto system,” stated Jim Green, director of Planetary Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington, at the start of the today’s news media briefing. The mission remains on track to conduct the complex close flyby science sequence in its entirety, as planned over the next week, including the July 14 flyby...