New Horizons

Occultation - August 4, 2018

Occultation team member Michael Skrutskie (University of Virginia) gives an impromptu lecture on observational astronomy to students from the University of Dakar following an “all hands" occultation team meeting near Dakar, Sénégal.

Occultation - August 4, 2018

Occultation team members François Colas (right) (Observatoire de Paris, France) and Salma Sylla Mbaye (center left) (Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Sénégal) show their telescope to Mary Teuw Niane (center right), the Sénégalese Minister of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation (MESRI), at one of the practice sessions held near Dakar before the stellar occultation by Ultima Thule, while other visitors (left) look on.

Occultation - August 4, 2018

Occultation Team Lead Marc Buie (center) gets his first look at the detection of Ultima Thule by stellar occultation in Louga, Sénégal, with Maram Kaire (right), Technical Advisor, Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation (MESRI) in Sénégal, and David Baratoux (left), Lead, African Initiative for Planetary and Space Sciences; Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), Université de Toulouse, France.

Ultima in View

The figure on the left is a composite image produced by adding 48 different exposures from the News Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), each with an exposure time of 29.967 seconds, taken on Aug. 16, 2018. The predicted position of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule is at the center of the yellow box, and is indicated by the red crosshairs, just above and left of a nearby star that is approximately 17 times brighter than Ultima.

The True Colors of Pluto

Three years after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft gave humankind our first close-up views of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, scientists are still revealing the wonders of these incredible worlds in the outer solar system.