New Horizons Team Selects Potential Kuiper Belt Flyby Target

NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.

Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt

Pluto on Pluto

Scott Johnson on July 14th: “The best thing about the Pluto image from NASA today is the silhouette of Pluto the dog right on it.”

How I imagine Pluto today

An animation by BennuBird celebrating New Horizons while passing near Pluto and its “heart” feature on July 14th 2015.

Pluto By Moonlight

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.

In this artist’s rendering, Pluto’s largest moon Charon rises over the frozen south pole surface of Pluto, casting a faint silvery luminescence across the distant planetary landscape. Source: NASA

New Horizons model for 3D printing

Source: NASA

New Horizons Plans July 7 Return to Normal Science Operations

Source: NASA

New Horizons Team Responds to Spacecraft Anomaly

Source: NASA

New Horizons Sees More Detail as It Draws Closer to Pluto

What a difference 20 million miles makes! Images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are growing in scale as the spacecraft approaches its mysterious target. The new images, taken May 8-12 using a powerful telescopic camera and downlinked last week, reveal more detail about Pluto’s complex and high-contrast surface.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

New Horizons Timeline

Possible ice cap on Pluto

This series of New Horizons images of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken at 13 different times spanning 6.5 days, starting on April 12 and ending on April 18, 2015. During that time, the NASA spacecraft’s distance from Pluto decreased from about 111 million kilometers to 104 million kilometers. 

NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

A postage stamp for Pluto

More than 11,000 people have signed an online petition to honor NASA's mission to Pluto and other denizens of the solar system's icy rim with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp — which is a fine way to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of Pluto's planetary coming-out party.

This concept art for a 2015 stamp celebrates NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Credit: Dan Durda / SwRI