CDSE Posts and Events

‘Pluto’

Benefits of Space Exploration

Get a “Lego” Up on Pluto-bound Probe!

December 25th, 2013

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is speeding quickly toward the first flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015. The real spacecraft – developed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland – is about the size and shape of a grand piano. The nuclear powered probe is about 6 feet (2 meters) on […]

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Attention Plutoites! ET Message Board Eyed

September 27th, 2013

A New Horizons Message Initiative is underway in the hopes of persuading NASA to upload a crowd-sourced message to the New Horizons probe that’s now outbound to Pluto. Based on bandwidth and the spacecraft’s onboard computers, the intent is to send pictures and sounds as was done on the Voyager Record – but this time, […]

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Scientists Probe Exploration of Pluto

August 1st, 2013

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is now 70 percent of the way along its journey to the Pluto system. It carries a sophisticated package with eight scientific instruments comprised of imagers, UV and IR spectrographs, plasma analyzers, a dust counter, and radio science. The probe’s payload was designed to reconnoiter the surfaces, atmospheres, interiors, and space […]

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Pluto-bound Spacecraft Spots Charon

July 10th, 2013

NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has spotted the ice-covered moon, Charon. The largest of Pluto’s five known moons, Charon orbits about 12,000 miles (more than 19,000 kilometers) away from Pluto itself. New Horizons spacecraft used its highest-resolution telescopic camera to image Pluto’s Texas-sized moon. In one of the above images, Pluto and Charon are circled: […]

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New Horizons to Pluto: Stay the Course!

June 15th, 2013

Launched in January 2006, the NASA New Horizons mission to distant Pluto is on target to whisk by that faraway world in July 2015. New news from the New Horizons team: Unless significant new hazards are found, the spacecraft is set to stay on its original course past Pluto and its moons. That’s the call […]

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Wake-up Call: Mission to Pluto in Good Health

January 11th, 2013

NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft has come out of hibernation mode to carry out system checks, as well as receive a new flight software upload and churn out science data downloads. The mission operations team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland “woke” New Horizons after 6 months of electronic slumber […]

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