Related papers: The New Horizons Spacecraft
Regular, low-cost Decadal-class science missions to planetary destinations will be enabled by high-{\Delta}V small spacecraft, such as the high-energy Photon, and small launch vehicles, such as Electron, to support expanding opportunities…
In anticipation of the July 2015 flyby of the Pluto system by NASA's New Horizons mission, we propose naming conventions and example names for surface features on Pluto and its satellites (Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, Styx) and names for…
Juno is a NASA mission launched in 2011 with the goal of studying Jupiter. The probe will arrive to the planet in 2016 and will be placed for one year in a polar high-eccentric orbit to study the composition of the planet, the gravity and…
The return of Comet 1P/Halley will promote a wide interest for ground and space observations of a celestial body of outstanding scientific and cultural interest. In addition to remote observations, space will open the possibility of in situ…
The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto on July 14, 2015, revealed the presence of haze in Pluto's atmosphere that were formed by CH4/N2 photochemistry at high altitudes in Pluto's atmosphere, as on Titan and Triton. In order to…
The COTS-Capsule Spaceborne hodoscope was launched into low earth orbit aboard the International Space Station and operated during 2021-2022. The primary objectives of the payload are: measuring and characterizing the radiation environment…
We have extended our earlier calculations of the distance to the Heliospheric Termination Shock (HTS) - which covered the period from the launch of V1 and V2 in 1977 to 2005 - to the period from 2006 to 2011. During this latter period the…
The New Horizons instrument named Ralph is a visible/near infrared multi-spectral imager and a short wavelength infrared spectral imager. It is one of the core instruments on New Horizons, NASA's first mission to the Pluto/Charon system and…
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has revealed the complex geology of Pluto and Charon. Pluto's encounter hemisphere shows ongoing surface geological activity centered on a vast basin containing a thick layer of volatile ices that appears to…
In May of 2011, NASA selected the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission as the third mission in the New Frontiers program. The other two New…
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…
The Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) was a 0.9 m telescope and moderate-resolution (~3 A) far-ultraviolet (820-1850 A) spectrograph that flew twice on the space shuttle, in 1990 December (Astro-1, STS-35) and 1995 March (Astro-2,…
As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft exits the Solar System bound for interstellar space, it has traveled so far that the nearest stars have shifted markedly from their positions seen from Earth. We demonstrated this by imaging the Proxima…
The joint JAXA/NASA ASTRO-H mission is the sixth in a series of highly successful X-ray missions developed by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), with a planned launch in 2015. The ASTRO-H mission is equipped with a…
We investigate the feasibility of a spacecraft mission to conduct a flyby of 3I/ATLAS, the third macroscopic interstellar object discovered on July 1 2025, as it traverses the Solar System. There are both ready-to-launch spacecraft…
CoRoT, which was launched successfully on the 27th of December 2006, is the first space mission to have the search for planetary transits at the heart of its science programme. It is expected to be able to detect transits of planets with…
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is an infrared observatory of novel design: deployable, with active optics, fully open to space for radiative cooling and orbiting the Lagrange point no. 2. This article explains the…
Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA-NASA mission planed for launch in October 2018. The science payload includes remote-sensing and in-situ instrumentation designed with the primary goal of understanding how the Sun creates and controls the…
The Ingenuity helicopter test flights on Mars in April 2021 marked the first time a powered aircraft has flown on another world. Students who have access to model helicopters and drones may wonder, how well could those hover on the Red…
The New Horizons spacecraft provided near global observations of Pluto that far exceed the resolution of Earth-based data sets. Most Pluto New Horizons analysis hitherto has focused on the encounter hemisphere of Pluto (i.e., the antiCharon…