Category Archives: Pluto

Scientists criticise Nasa for scaling back mission to explore beyond Pluto

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Anger at decision to axe the main task of the New Horizons spacecraft to probe the remote Kuiper belt

It may have reached the edge of the solar system and travelled more than 5 billion miles through space, but the New Horizons spacecraft is causing major ripples on Earth. A dispute has erupted between scientists and US space officials in the wake of Nasa’s decision to stop funding next year for the vessel’s main mission.

The move was described as “misguided and unfortunate” by Alan Stern, New Horizons’s principal investigator.

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Beyond Pluto: the hunt for our solar system’s new ninth planet

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Scientists think a planet larger than Earth lurks in the far reaches of the solar system. Now a new telescope could confirm their belief and change solar system science

You’d think that if you found the first evidence that a planet larger than the Earth was lurking unseen in the furthest reaches of our solar system, it would be a big moment. It would make you one of only a small handful of people in all of history to have discovered such a thing.

But for astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, it was a much quieter affair. “It wasn’t like there was a eureka moment,” he says. “The evidence just built up slowly.”

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First close-ups of Ultima Thule reveal it resembles dark red snowman

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Images of rock on the edge of the solar system were taken on the most distant flyby in history

Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft has beamed home its first close-up images of Ultima Thule, a lump of rock the shape of an unfinished snowman that lies 4 billion miles away on the edge of the solar system.

Taken as the probe sped past the body in the early hours of New Year’s Day, the pictures reveal a dark reddish object about 21 miles long and 10 miles wide that spins on its axis once every 15 hours or so. The colour image of Ultima Thule, revealing its reddish tint, was taken at 05.01 GMT on New Year’s Day from a distance of about 18,000 miles, 30 minutes before the probe made its closest pass of the space rock.

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