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The New Horizons ALICE instrument is a lightweight (4.4 kg), low-power (4.4 Watt) imaging spectrograph aboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto/Charon and the Kuiper Belt. Its primary job is to determine the relative abundances of various…
The LOng-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is the high resolution imaging instrument for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, its giant satellite Charon, its small moons Nix and Hydra, and the Kuiper Belt, which is the vast region of icy…
The New Horizons mission was launched on 2006 January 19, and the spacecraft is heading for a flyby encounter with the Pluto system in the summer of 2015. The challenges associated with sending a spacecraft to Pluto in less than 10 years…
The outer solar system provides a unique, quiet vantage point from which to observe the universe around us, where measurements could enable several niche astrophysical science cases that are too difficult to perform near Earth. NASA's New…
NASA's New Horizons (NH) Pluto-Kuiper belt (PKB) mission was launched on 19 January 2006 on a Jupiter Gravity Assist (JGA) trajectory toward the Pluto system for a 14 July 2015 closest approach; Jupiter closest approach occurred on 28…
The Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument on New Horizons will measure the interaction between the solar wind and ions created by atmospheric loss from Pluto. These measurements provide a characterization of the total loss rate and…
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft observed (15810) 1994 JR$_1$, a 3:2 resonant Kupier Belt Object (KBO), using the LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on November 2, 2015 from a distance of 1.85 AU, and again on April 7, 2016 from a…
The New Horizons spacecraft will achieve a wide range of measurement objectives at the Pluto system, including color and panchromatic maps, 1.25-2.50 micron spectral images for studying surface compositions, and measurements of Pluto's…
The first exploration of Pluto was motivated by (i) the many intriguing aspects of this body, its atmosphere, and its giant impact binary-planet formation; as well as (ii) the scientific desire to initiate the reconnaissance of the…
The New Horizons spacecraft, launched by NASA in 2006, will arrive in the Pluto-Charon system on July 14, 2015. There, it will spend a few hours imaging Pluto and its moons. It will then have a small amount of reserve propellant which will…
The LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) is a panchromatic (360--910 nm), narrow-angle (field of view = 0.29 deg), high spatial resolution (pixel scale = 1.02 arcsec) visible light imager used on NASA's New Horizons (NH) mission for…
Following the Pluto fly-by of the New Horizons spacecraft, the mission provided a unique opportunity to explore the Kuiper Belt in-situ. The possibility existed to fly-by a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) as well as to observe additional objects…
We map the surface of Pluto using an unsupervised machine learning technique using the near-infrared observations of the LEISA/Ralph instrument onboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The principal component reduced Gaussian mixture model…
We report results of a recently-completed pre-Formulation Phase study of SPIRIT, a candidate NASA Origins Probe mission. SPIRIT is a spatial and spectral interferometer with an operating wavelength range 25 - 400 microns. SPIRIT will…
We present THERMAP, a mid-infrared (8-16 {\mu}m) spectro-imager for space missions to small bodies in the inner solar system, developed in the framework of the MarcoPolo-R asteroid sample return mission. THERMAP is very well suited to…
The central objective of the New Horizons prime mission was to make the first exploration of Pluto and its system of moons. Following that, New Horizons has been approved for its first extended mission, which has the objectives of…
Observations of Pluto's companion planet Charon have so far yielded no compelling evidence for a persistent atmosphere. However, with the upcoming encounter of New Horizons at the Pluto-Charon system, sensitivity to detection of a possible…
The Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) on board the Euclid satellite provides multiband photometry and R>=450 slitless grism spectroscopy in the 950-2020nm wavelength range. In this reference article we illuminate the…
The Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's Great Observatory for infrared astronomy, has made available new tools for the investigation of the infrared properties of planetary nebulae. The three instruments onboard, including the Infrared Array…
A proposed Vera C. Rubin Observatory Deep Drilling micro-survey of the Kuiper Belt will investigate key properties of the distant solar system. Utilizing 30 hours of Rubin time across six 5-hour visits over one year starting in summer 2026,…