Cassini
The Wire July 14, 2015 In under seven hours, the NASA New Horizons space probe will flyby Pluto at 49,900 km per hour, from a distance of 12,500 km. It’s what the probe set out to do when it was launched in January 2006. The flyby will
Alan Stern
The Wire July 6, 2015 In the last mile of its 3,464-day journey and only ten days away from a historic rendezvous with the dwarf planet Pluto, the New Horizons probe experienced an anomaly on July 4 and prompted the on-board computer to switch to ‘safe mode’. The event
barycenter
The Wire June 22, 2015 It may not look like much, but this heavily pixelated GIF image is cause for celebration. It effectively cost a robotic space probe more than nine years of travel and $600 million in manufacturing and operational charges. But then again, that’s not why the
Charon
The Wire May 29, 2015 47 days 23 hours 39 minutes! — Alex Parker (@Alex_Parker) May 27, 2015 Alex Parker is a planetary astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute, Texas, and he posted his tweet just as I started writing this piece. And not just for Parker – it’s an
