Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
This was the last major planet orbit crossing before the Pluto flyby. At the time, the spacecraft was 3.99 billion km (2.48 billion mi; 26.7 AU) away from Neptune and 4.51 billion km (2.80 billion mi; 30.1 AU) from the Sun.
Pluto 350 aimed to send a spacecraft, weighing around 350 kilograms, to Pluto. [11] The spacecraft's minimalistic design was to allow it to travel faster and be more cost-effective, in contrast to most other big-budget projects NASA were developing at the time, such as Galileo and Cassini. Pluto 350, however, would later become controversial ...
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
Montage of planets and some moons that the two Voyager spacecraft have visited and studied. It is the only program that visited all four outer planets. A total of nine spacecraft have been launched on missions that involve visits to the outer planets; all nine missions involve encounters with Jupiter, with four spacecraft also visiting Saturn.
NASA has released the 'first and best' images the New Horizons spacecraft was able to take of Pluto during its flyby of the dwarf planet in July.
In January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41 on a mission to visit Pluto. To accelerate toward its target, the spacecraft used an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory , achieving a speed of approximately 16.26 km/s (10.10 mi/s; 58,500 km/h; 36,400 mph), and later performed a gravity assist ...