An Update on America's Next Interstellar-bound Probe...

NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute / Serge Brunier / Marc Postman / Dan Durda

NASA’s New Horizons Enters Mission’s Longest Hibernation Period (News Release)

Running with updated onboard fault protection software that improves its ability to operate farther from the Sun than originally designed, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has entered the longest hibernation phase of its mission.

At 4:12 a.m. EDT on August 7, flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, verified that New Horizons – acting on commands uplinked to its main computer on July 23 – had safely entered hibernation mode again. With the spacecraft now in the outer Kuiper Belt and more than 5.7 billion miles (9.2 billion kilometers) from Earth, the radio signals carrying that confirmation message from New Horizons needed 8 hours and 31 minutes – traveling at the speed of light – to reach the APL Mission Operations Center through NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Network station in California.

New Horizons, which had been in active data-collection mode since April, will now remain in hibernation. Pending a final Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the spacecraft may be awoken in late June 2026. This will be the longest hibernation period of the mission so far, surpassing the previous mark of 273 days from June 2022 to March 2023.

But the spacecraft won’t be completely at rest; New Horizons will continue to take round-the-clock measurements of the charged-particle environment in the Sun’s outer heliosphere and the dust environment of the Kuiper Belt using three different onboard scientific instruments. These data will be transmitted back to Earth when New Horizons wakes up.

“Even when our spacecraft sleeps, round-the-clock science data collection never stops,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

What Is Hibernation? Hibernation is a way to extend spacecraft life and reduce mission operations costs. During hibernation, New Horizons remains in a stable spinning mode with much of the spacecraft unpowered. The onboard flight computer monitors system health and broadcasts a weekly beacon-status tone back to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network of communications and tracking ground stations.

Since 2007, New Horizons has hibernated 23 times, for periods ranging from just days to many months.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and the mission’s principal investigator. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern, who leads the mission for NASA. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center’s Planetary Management Office in Huntsville, Alabama, provides NASA oversight for New Horizons.

Source: NASA.Gov

On This Day in 2015: Remembering New Horizons' Historic Flyby of Pluto and its Moons...

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

So it was 10 years ago today that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft became the first-ever robotic probe to explore the dwarf planet Pluto and its five moons (Charon, Nix, Styx, Kerberos and Hydra) up-close. Even though Pluto has been a dwarf planet since the summer of 2006...when the International Astronomical Union demoted the former ninth planet from the Sun, this flyby completes NASA's robotic investigation of all the classical worlds (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) in our Solar System. Dozens of other objects have been discovered in the Kuiper Belt region beyond Pluto since then, but the 2015 encounter marked a major milestone in planetary exploration.

New Horizons is now destined to become the third functioning spacecraft to reach interstellar space—behind Voyager 1 and 2. Of course, saying that New Horizons will still be functional when it leaves the heliosphere may be a bit optimistic, as Trump lackey Russ Vought wants New Horizons to be one of the dozens of space missions that gets decommissioned under the White House's crappy budget for fiscal year (FY) 2026. Fortunately, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives reject the attempt by Vought to impose his PROJECT 2025 nonsense to NASA's venerable planetary science program.

We'll see what happens when the FY 2026 budget supposedly becomes enacted on October 1st. Stay tuned.

A CD carrying the names of 430,000 people is onboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft as it literally heads to the stars...

I missed the deadline to submit my own name (as well as those of my family members and friends) in September 2005. 😭 pic.twitter.com/bAoZ23VBbw

— Rich Par (@AstroPnoy) July 14, 2025

Interstellar Probe: The Dream Is Lost (Again)...

Earlier today, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) released the long-awaited Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey...a report that recommended to NASA what type of heliophysics-centric mission the agency should undertake over the next 10 years.

The decadal survey proposed that NASA conduct two flagship-class missions: Links, a satellite constellation that consisted of over two dozen spacecraft flying in different orbits to study Earth's magnetosphere, and the Solar Polar Orbiter—a mission that would see a robotic probe orbiting the Sun's polar regions to observe them from above.

What the decadal survey didn't recommend was an ambitious mission that I've been enthusiastically posting about since early 2021: the Interstellar Probe (IP).

Just like what happened when the Trident Neptune-Triton flyby mission was rejected by NASA in early 2021 in favor of two Venus-bound spacecraft, I'm absolutely disappointed that the Interstellar Probe will not see the light of day. At least within the next decade or so, and in the type of mission profile that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory—who NASA paid $4 million to study the feasibility of this project and would've built the IP spacecraft itself—proposed in its Mission Concept Report three years ago.

If you've been reading this Blog since at least September of 2005 (stop smirking), you'll know just how eager I am to see NASA develop another Pioneer/Voyager/New Horizons-type mission that will fly to the outer Solar System and beyond. Obviously, I was very excited to see what kind of scientific discoveries IP would make during a 15-year journey to interstellar space (on a mission that was designed to last up to 50 years), but it was the dream of putting my name on the spacecraft in a potential public outreach campaign (like what was done with New Horizons back in 2005—when over 430,000 people submitted their names online to be flown on a compact disc aboard the Pluto-bound explorer) that enthralled me about this endeavor.

I got to send a message via radio signal to the exoplanet Gliese 581d courtesy of the Hello From Earth campaign in 2009, but to have my name on an actual spacecraft and not in an energy wave traveling through the Milky Way galaxy some day was obviously a more wondrous scenario.

What makes me especially annoyed about this new decadal survey is that the Solar Polar Orbiter is basically a rehash of the NASA and European Space Agency's Ulysses mission which launched in 1990 and studied the Sun till 2008. Unlike Ulysses, however, the Solar Polar Orbiter would be equipped with cameras to photograph the northern and southern regions of our host star.

Big whoop. What's that compared to potentially capturing an image of our entire Solar System from beyond the heliosphere courtesy of the Interstellar Probe?

Seeing as how NASEM wanted NASA to focus on the near-Earth space environment and how solar activity affected it, it's clearly obvious that the decadal survey was influenced by this year's geomagnetic storms that caused auroras to be visible around much of the globe. This is similar to how the 2020 discovery of phosphine in Venus' atmosphere ultimately caused Trident to be rejected in favor of the VERITAS and DAVINCI missions...which NASA doesn't even care to launch to the Evening Star till sometime next decade.

(Trident would've lifted off for Neptune either next year or 2026 had NASA approved it as its next Discovery-class mission.)

Well... It's clearly obvious that the Universe doesn't really want me to put my moniker on a New Horizons-type spacecraft anytime soon. I guess I'll just have to stick with submitting my name to fly on missions within our Solar System instead.

But one thing is certain: I can have a virtual presence on over a hundred spacecraft venturing to destinations as close as Venus (courtesy of Akatsuki) and worlds as distant as Saturn (through Cassini) in our Solar System, and these missions will never make up for me missing out on New Horizons...or having the dream opportunity that is the Interstellar Probe taken from me and everyone else who are enamored by the idea of having their name attached to a manmade object drifting through the cosmos.

Happy Thursday.


Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory


Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

So @theNASEM's Heliophysics Decadal Survey is out... The survey recommends near-Earth solar-monitoring missions but apparently not the Interstellar Probe...which is a shame considering that Voyager 1 may be in its final years of operation.https://t.co/k4Q1LioCX2 pic.twitter.com/HEe77m3Y7i

— Rich Par (@AstroPnoy) December 5, 2024

I guess all the talk about SLS being cancelled (when this was the launch vehicle mentioned in @JHUAPL's report on Interstellar Probe) made @TheNASEM hesitant about recommending this project.

Like what happened with JHUAPL's Neptune Odyssey in the 2022 Decadal Survey. pic.twitter.com/acBDrHlsjH

— Rich Par (@AstroPnoy) December 5, 2024

The Latest News About the Region Beyond Pluto...

Dan Durda, FIAAA

New Horizons Team Detects Evidence of Unexpected Population of Kuiper Belt Objects (News Release)

Discovery suggests that the Solar System may have formed from a much larger protostellar disk, and portends new objects for NASA’s New Horizons to study

A new, peer-reviewed study authored by NASA’s New Horizons Kuiper Belt search team reports the detection of an unexpected population of very distant bodies in the Kuiper Belt, an outer region of our Solar System populated by ancient remnants of planetary building blocks lying beyond the orbit of Neptune. The study used data collected with the 8.2-meter diameter Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. New Horizons is the NASA spacecraft sent to explore the Pluto system and Kuiper Belt.

The newly-detected Kuiper Belt objects reported in the study, published this month in the Planetary Science Journal of the American Astronomical Society, stretch out to almost 90 times as far from the Sun as Earth. A preprint can be found at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.21142

The new result has multiple implications. One is that the Kuiper Belt may extend farther than formerly believed, or that there is a second Kuiper Belt beyond the one observationally discovered in the 1990s. A second implication is that the New Horizons spacecraft, now about 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth, is not past the Kuiper Belt as earlier expected.

“Our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt long appeared to be very small in comparison with many other planetary systems, but our results suggest that idea might just have arisen due to an observational bias,” said Wes Fraser, of the National Research Council of Canada, a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission science team and the study’s lead author. “Our Subaru observations searched down to fainter detection limits and found a significant Kuiper Belt mass at 70 to 90 times as far from the Sun as Earth. So maybe, if this result is confirmed, our Kuiper Belt isn’t all that small and unusual after all compared to those around other stars.”

One possibility is that this new population of Kuiper Belt objects could be a dynamically resonant population with Neptune, gravitationally affecting these Kuiper Belt objects in just the right way to cause their orbital period to be a precise multiple of Neptune’s orbital period. Alternatively, this new population of Kuiper Belt objects may challenge some aspects of current models of the Solar System's formation, suggesting that the disk of planetary material from which the Solar System formed was much larger than previously thought.

“We still have much to learn about what this distant population actually looks like, but what’s fascinating is that there is a new Kuiper Belt population out there at all,” Fraser continued.

Co-author and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, Texas, added, “This is a groundbreaking discovery revealing something unexpected, new and exciting in the distant reaches of the Solar System; this discovery probably would not have been possible without the world-class capabilities of Subaru Telescope. We look forward to finding objects in this new population for New Horizons to observe, either at close or at far range.”

This work was supported by NASA’s New Horizons mission and NASA Keck PI Data Awards, administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. Data were obtained at the Subaru Telescope from telescope time allocated to NASA through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate and the mission’s Principal Investigator.

The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), based in San Antonio, Texas, directs the mission via SwRI’s Principal Investigator Alan Stern, who leads the mission for NASA. NASA Marshall Space Flight Center’s Planetary Management Office in Huntsville, Alabama provides NASA oversight for New Horizons.

Source: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

NASA's Next Interstellar-bound Probe Has Revealed Just How Bright the Cosmos Really Is...

NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute / Serge Brunier / Marc Postman / Dan Durda

New Horizons Measurements Shed New Light on the Darkness of the Universe (News Release - August 28)

Just how dark is deep space? Astronomers may have finally answered this long-standing question by tapping into the capabilities and distant position of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, by making the most precise, direct measurements ever of the total amount of light the Universe generates.

More than 18 years after launch and nine years after its historic exploration of Pluto, New Horizons is more than 5.4 billion miles (7.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, in a region of the Solar System far enough from the Sun to offer the darkest skies available to any existing telescope – and to provide a unique vantage point from which to measure the overall brightness of the distant Universe.

"If you hold up your hand in deep space, how much light does the Universe shine on it?" asked Marc Postman, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and lead author of a new paper detailing the research, published today in the Astrophysical Journal. "We now have a good idea of just how dark space really is. The results show that the great majority of visible light we receive from the Universe was generated in galaxies. Importantly, we also found that there is no evidence for significant levels of light produced by sources not presently known to astronomers."

The findings solve a puzzle that has perplexed scientists since the 1960s, when astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered that space is pervaded by strong microwave radiation, which had been predicted to be left over from the creation of the Universe itself. This result led to their being awarded the Nobel Prize. Subsequently, astronomers also found evidence of backgrounds of X-rays, gamma rays and infrared radiation that also fill the sky.

Detecting the background of "ordinary" (or visible) light – more formally called the cosmic optical background, or COB – provided a way to add up all the light generated by galaxies over the lifetime of the Universe before NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope could see the faint background galaxies directly.

In the Hubble and James Webb telescope era, astronomers measure the COB to detect light that might come from sources other than these known galaxies. But measuring the total light output of the Universe is extremely difficult from Earth or anywhere in the inner Solar System.

"People have tried over and over to measure it directly, but in our part of the Solar System, there’s just too much sunlight and reflected interplanetary dust that scatters the light around into a hazy fog that obscures the faint light from the distant Universe," said Tod Lauer, a New Horizons co-investigator, astronomer from the National Science Foundation NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona, and a co-author of the new paper. "All attempts to measure the strength of the COB from the inner Solar System suffer from large uncertainties."

Enter New Horizons, billions of miles along its trek beyond the planets, now deep in the Kuiper Belt and headed towards interstellar space. Late last summer, from a distance 57 times farther from the Sun than Earth, New Horizons scanned the Universe with its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), collecting two-dozen separate imaging fields. LORRI itself was intentionally shielded from the Sun by the main body of the spacecraft – keeping even the dimmest sunlight from directly entering the sensitive camera – and the target fields were positioned away from the bright disk and core of the Milky Way and nearby bright stars.

The New Horizons observers used other data, taken in the far-infrared by the European Space Agency’s Planck mission, of fields with a range in dust density to calibrate the level of those far-infrared emissions to the level of ordinary visible light. This allowed them to accurately predict and correct for the presence of dust-scattered Milky Way light in the COB images – a technique that was not available to them during a 2021 test COB observation run with New Horizons in which they underestimated the amount of dust-scattered light and overestimated excess light from the Universe itself. But this time around, after accounting for all known sources of light, such as background stars and light scattered by thin clouds of dust within the Milky Way galaxy, the researchers found that the remaining level of visible light was entirely consistent with the intensity of light generated by all galaxies over the past 12.6 billion years.

"The simplest interpretation is that the COB is completely due to galaxies," Lauer said. "Looking outside the galaxies, we find darkness there and nothing more."

"This newly-published work is an important contribution to fundamental cosmology, and really something that could only be done with a far-away spacecraft like New Horizons," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "And it shows that our current extended mission is making important scientific contributions far beyond the original intent of this planetary mission designed to make the first close spacecraft explorations of Pluto and Kuiper Belt objects."

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at a planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, imaging distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in the farthest regions of the Solar System.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Source: Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

The Latest Update from a Spacecraft 5.5 Billion Miles Away...

SwRI / Dan Durda / JHUAPL / Ken Moscati

NASA’s New Horizons Detects Dusty Hints of Extended Kuiper Belt (News Release)

New observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt – the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks – might stretch much farther out than we thought.

Speeding through the outer edges of the Kuiper Belt, almost 60 times farther from the Sun than Earth, the New Horizons Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) instrument is detecting higher than expected levels of dust – the tiny frozen remnants of collisions between larger Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) and particles kicked up from KBOs being peppered by microscopic dust impactors from outside of the solar system.

The readings defy scientific models that the KBO population and density of dust should start to decline a billion miles inside that distance and contribute to a growing body of evidence that suggests the outer edge of the main Kuiper Belt could extend billions of miles farther than current estimates – or that there could even be a second belt beyond the one we already know.

The results appear in the February 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“New Horizons is making the first direct measurements of interplanetary dust far beyond Neptune and Pluto, so every observation could lead to a discovery,” said Alex Doner, lead author of the paper and a physics graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder who serves as SDC lead. “The idea that we might have detected an extended Kuiper Belt — with a whole new population of objects colliding and producing more dust – offers another clue in solving the mysteries of the solar system’s most distant regions.”

Designed and built by students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder under the guidance of professional engineers, SDC has detected microscopic dust grains produced by collisions among asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt objects all along New Horizons’ 5-billion-mile, 18-year journey across our solar system – which after launch in 2006 included historic flybys of Pluto in 2015 and the KBO Arrokoth in 2019. The first science instrument on a NASA planetary mission to be designed, built and “flown” by students, the SDC counts and measures the sizes of dust particles, producing information on the collision rates of such bodies in the outer solar system.

The latest, surprising results were compiled over three years as New Horizons traveled from 45 to 55 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun – with one AU being the distance between Earth and Sun, about 93 million miles or 140 million kilometers.

These readings come as New Horizons scientists, using observatories like the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, have also discovered a number of KBOs far beyond the traditional outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. This outer edge (where the density of objects starts to decline) was thought to be at about 50 AU, but new evidence suggests that the belt may extend to 80 AU, or farther.

As telescope observations continue, Doner said, scientists are looking at other possible reasons for the high SDC dust readings. One possibility, perhaps less likely, is radiation pressure and other factors pushing dust created in the inner Kuiper Belt out past 50 AU.

New Horizons could also have encountered shorter-lived ice particles that cannot reach the inner parts of the solar system and were not yet accounted for in the current models of the Kuiper Belt.

“These new scientific results from New Horizons may be the first time that any spacecraft has discovered a new population of bodies in our solar system,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. “I can’t wait to see how much farther out these elevated Kuiper Belt dust levels go.”

Now into its second extended mission, New Horizons is expected to have sufficient propellant and power to operate through the 2040s, at distances beyond 100 AU from the Sun. That far out, mission scientists say, the SDC could potentially even record the spacecraft’s transition into a region where interstellar particles dominate the dust environment.

With complementary telescopic observations of the Kuiper Belt from Earth, New Horizons, as the only spacecraft operating in and collecting new information about the Kuiper Belt, has a unique opportunity to learn more about KBOs, dust sources and expanse of the belt, and interstellar dust and the dust disks around other stars.

Source: NASA.Gov

America's Next Interstellar-bound Space Probe Will Operate Through At Least 2028...

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Roman Tkachenko

NASA’s New Horizons to Continue Exploring Outer Solar System (News Release)

NASA has announced an updated plan to continue New Horizons’ mission of exploration of the outer solar system.

Beginning in fiscal year 2025, New Horizons will focus on gathering unique heliophysics data, which can be readily obtained during an extended, low-activity mode of operations.

While the science community is currently not aware of any reachable Kuiper Belt object, this new path allows for the possibility of using the spacecraft for a future close flyby of such an object, should one be identified. It will also enable the spacecraft to preserve fuel and reduce operational complexity while a search is conducted for a compelling flyby candidate.

“The New Horizons mission has a unique position in our solar system to answer important questions about our heliosphere and provide extraordinary opportunities for multidisciplinary science for NASA and the scientific community,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The agency decided that it was best to extend operations for New Horizons until the spacecraft exits the Kuiper Belt, which is expected in 2028 through 2029.”

This new, extended mission will be primarily funded by NASA’s Planetary Science Division and jointly managed by NASA’s Heliophysics and Planetary Science Divisions.

NASA will assess the budget impact of continuing the New Horizons mission so far beyond its original plan of exploration. As a starting point, funding within the New Frontiers program (including science research and data analysis) will be rebalanced to accommodate extended New Horizons operations, and future projects may be impacted.

Launched on January 18, 2006, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has helped scientists understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by visiting the dwarf planet Pluto (its primary mission) and then venturing farther out for a flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, a double-lobed relic of the formation of our solar system, and other more remote observations of similar bodies.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Marshall Space Flight Center Planetary Management Office provides NASA oversight for New Horizons.

The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Stern, and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Source: NASA.Gov

Hubble's Successor Receives Accolades for Its On-Orbit Achievements in 2022...

Northrop Grumman

NASA’s Webb Telescope Awarded Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy (News Release)

The team behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been selected to receive the 2023 Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, the premier award from the National Space Club and Foundation. This annual award honors an individual, group or program deemed by the Club to have made the most significant contribution to space activity in the previous year.

The award will be presented at the Club’s yearly Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Dinner in Washington on March 10, 2023.

In 2022, the Webb team successfully completed an intricate series of deployments to unfold the observatory into its final configuration in space. They then precisely aligned its mirrors to within nanometers, set up and tested its powerful instruments, and officially began Webb’s mission to explore the infrared universe.

With its optics performing nearly twice as well as the mission required, Webb has already spotted some of the earliest galaxies ever observed, peered through dusty clouds to see stars forming, and provided a more detailed look at the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system than ever before. The Goddard Trophy will recognize the contributions of the team that designed, developed and now operate Webb, including individuals from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland; Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore; and Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colorado.

The mission was also made possible by many international contributions from partnerships with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

“Our team designed the James Webb Space Telescope to see the first lights that illuminated our universe,” said Mike Menzel, NASA Mission Systems Engineer for Webb at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This required the largest ‘first of its kind’ telescope ever put into space along with 50 of the most complex deployments ever attempted to essentially re-build it on-orbit. After all these many years and many engineering challenges our team was struck with awe and wonder at the first images, and the satisfaction of knowing that whatever is out there we will see it.”

Recent winners of the Goddard Memorial Trophy include the teams behind NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, New Horizons and Kepler mission.

Webb, an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), is the world’s premier space science observatory. Its design pushed the boundaries of space telescope capabilities to solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.

NASA Headquarters, Washington oversees the Webb Telescope mission. NASA Goddard manages Webb for the agency and oversees work on the mission performed by the Space Telescope Science Institute, Northrop Grumman and other mission partners.

In addition to Goddard, several NASA centers contributed to the project, including the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and others. Webb’s accomplishments have also recently been recognized by organizations including Aviation Week, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science and TIME.

Source: NASA.Gov

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ESA / Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team. Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

NASA Continues to Test Hardware for the Dragonfly Rotorcraft That Will Explore Saturn's Largest Moon...

NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Steve Gribben

Rotors for Mission to Titan Tested at Langley’s Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (News Release - December 20)

NASA explores the unknown in space, bringing the secrets of our solar system home so we can apply that information for the benefit of humanity. In that spirit, NASA will explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, to help advance humanity’s search for the building blocks of life in the universe.

A key component of the 8-rotor Dragonfly vehicle that will make that journey to Titan recently underwent testing at the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT) at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

Similar to a drone, Dragonfly will traverse Titan’s dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, then land on, sample and examine various sites. Dragonfly will have four pairs of rotors, each with two rotors in coaxial configuration, meaning one rotor above the other.

It’s similar to, but significantly larger than, a typical terrestrial drone, as the vehicle is over 12 feet both nose to tail and at the widest points, rotor tip-to-tip.

Researchers at Langley and from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) conducted a number of tests on a coaxial pair of rotors at the TDT meant to validate computer models. The large test section enabled the use of full-scale flight representative hardware, and the ability to fill the tunnel with heavy gas allowed the hardware to be tested at Titan-representative aerodynamic loads.

Researchers simulated expected conditions for hover, descent and climb, and assessed aerodynamic loads for each rotor at a variety of wind speeds, rotor shaft angles and rotor throttle settings. Researchers also conducted tests with one rotor operating and the other stationary to assess failure modes.

Sensors and accelerometers on the test article measured the loads and accelerations created by each rotor under various wind speeds, orientations and rotor speeds. Preliminary analysis of the data indicates that CFD predictions of rotor performance and power requirements are valid, and similar predictions for operation on Titan are within expected mission tolerances.

“The testing at this one-of-a-kind facility was a crucial early step toward bringing this exciting mission to fruition,” said Richard Heisler, wind tunnel test lead for Dragonfly at APL, which is designing and building the rotorcraft and manages the mission for NASA. “The data we collected at the TDT will give us a much clearer picture of how we can expect Dragonfly’s rotors to perform in Titan’s alien atmosphere.”

Dragonfly is scheduled to launch in 2027 and reach Titan by 2034, when it will begin what is expected to be a 3-year mission to explore and shed light on the complex chemistry on the exotic moon and ocean world. It was selected in June 2019 as part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, which includes the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, Juno to Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx to the asteroid Bennu.

Dragonfly is led by Principal Investigator Elizabeth Turtle at APL, which is located in Laurel, Maryland.

Source: NASA.Gov

****


NASA / Harlen Capen

I'm totally diggin' the new design for NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft!

The June 2027 launch and 2034 arrival at Titan can't come soon enough... 🙂https://t.co/QWX6d8nrEH #DragonflyMission pic.twitter.com/qd52bnHqcD

— Rich Par (@AstroPnoy) December 31, 2022

On This Day in 2007: A Journey to Vesta and Ceres Begins from Cape Canaveral in Florida...

NASA

15 Years Ago: Dawn Begins Voyage to Asteroid Vesta and Dwarf Planet Ceres (News Release)

The history-making Dawn mission, part of NASA’s Discovery Program and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Pasadena, California, left Earth on September 27, 2007, to study the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, providing scientists with an opportunity to learn more about the solar system’s formation.

Dawn used solar electric propulsion for most of its trajectory control, supplemented by a gravity-assist from Mars.

Dawn spent 14 months orbiting Vesta before moving on to orbit Ceres, the first spacecraft to orbit two different celestial bodies. It observed the dwarf planet until October 2018, when it ran out of attitude control fuel. The Dawn mission proved the value of ion propulsion to explore bodies in the solar system.

Managers named the ninth mission in the Discovery Program Dawn because they hoped it would reveal clues about the physical and chemical conditions in the earliest days of the solar system. Its two targets, the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, together comprise 45% of the mass in the asteroid belt. They have survived relatively intact from the solar system’s early days yet have remarkably different compositions, providing scientists with an opportunity to learn more about the processes of early planetary formation.

Because chemical engines would have required a prohibitively large amount of fuel to enable Dawn’s dual-target mission to the asteroid belt, the spacecraft relied on solar electric propulsion instead, using an ion propulsion system with 937 pounds of Xenon gas as a fuel source and power from its solar arrays. Between 1998 and 2001, Dawn’s predecessor the Deep Space 1 spacecraft demonstrated the utility of ion propulsion for an interplanetary mission by operating its ion engine for more than 16,000 hours, enabling it to fly by the asteroid Braille and the comet Borrelly.

Dawn lifted off on September 27, 2007, atop a Delta II rocket from Launch Complex 17B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida.

After insertion into heliocentric orbit, Dawn unfurled its solar arrays, the most powerful flown on an interplanetary mission. For the next 80 days, flight managers checked out Dawn’s systems including its three ion propulsion system thrusters and reaction wheel assemblies used for attitude control.

A long-duration system test of one of the ion thrusters began on November 6 and ended 165 hours later. Flight directors tested each of Dawn’s science instruments and found them in good working order.

With the initial checkout complete, Dawn turned on one of its ion thrusters on December 17, operating it until October 31, 2008, to align the spacecraft for its gravity-assist encounter with Mars.

Dawn carried three instruments to study the geology, elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, geomorphology and tectonic history of Vesta and Ceres. The spacecraft’s orbital characteristics aided in determining the bodies’ masses and gravity fields.

The instruments included:

- A gamma-ray and neutron detector (GRaND).
- A visible and infrared (VIR) mapping spectrometer.
- Two identical framing cameras (FC).

After thrusting nearly continuously for 270 days, Dawn turned its ion engine off and began a coast phase toward its first planetary encounter, a gravity-assist flyby of Mars. On February 18, 2009, Dawn passed within 337 miles of the Red Planet. The close flyby not only increased Dawn’s velocity, it also changed the plane of its orbit, setting it up for its journey to Vesta.

The Mars flyby also provided an opportunity to calibrate Dawn’s instruments. The GRaND instrument collected data that scientists correlated with similar data collected by Mars Odyssey in orbit around Mars. The spacecraft entered a safe mode due to problems with its star trackers, causing some loss of science calibration data, but the event did not impact the gravity-assist flyby itself.

Dawn performed some tests of its thrusters after the flyby and resumed thrusting on June 8, 2009, continuing until arrival at Vesta. Although one of the spacecraft’s four reaction wheel assemblies failed on June 17, 2010, this did not affect operations as the three remaining ones adequately controlled its attitude.

On May 3, 2011, Dawn acquired its first targeting image of Vesta still half a million miles away. As it approached the asteroid, the spacecraft returned progressively higher resolution images. Dawn used its ion thrusters to enter orbit around Vesta on July 16, 2011, the first spacecraft to orbit any main belt object.

During its nearly 14 months at Vesta, Dawn operated in six distinct science orbits to optimize data gathering by its science instruments. The spacecraft returned more than 30,000 images of the asteroid, far more than planned and fully mapping its surface, and much additional science information. It determined that Vesta has an iron-nickel core, its size large enough to allow it to differentiate.

Dawn confirmed Vesta as the parent body of the most numerous type of meteorite found on Earth.

On September 5, 2012, Dawn departed Vesta using its ion engines to begin its two-and-a-half-year journey to its next and final destination, the dwarf planet Ceres, discovered in 1801 and the largest body in the asteroid belt.

Although a second reaction wheel assembly failed just prior to Dawn’s departure from Vesta, flight controllers devised a workaround to maintain the spacecraft’s attitude. The spacecraft’s ion thruster fired continuously – with a short interruption in September 2014 when it entered a safe mode – until it arrived in orbit around Ceres.

Because of the two failed reaction wheel assemblies, Dawn took fewer images during its approach to Ceres than it did for Vesta, but by January 26, 2015, those images exceeded the highest-resolution photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dawn entered orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015, marking the first time a single spacecraft orbited two different celestial bodies and, coming four months before New Horizons flew by dwarf planet Pluto, the first time a spacecraft observed a dwarf planet.

Dawn completed the first topographic map of Ceres during this initial polar orbit. Over the next three years, Dawn repositioned itself into nine different orbits for different phases of its science mission. Its primary mission ended in June 2016, but managers granted it a one-year extension to continue its exploration of Ceres as the dwarf planet approached its perihelion, or closest distance to the Sun.

Managers extended its mission once again in 2017, and placed it in a relatively stable orbit, ensuring that it would not impact the dwarf planet for at least 20 years and most likely 50 years.

Dawn discovered bright spots on Ceres, such as Cerealia Facula inside the Occator Crater, salty deposits composed mainly of sodium carbonate that made their way to the surface in a slushy brine from within or below the crust. This computer-generated video made from images returned by Dawn simulate a flyover of Cerealia Facula.

On October 31, 2018, Dawn finally ran out of attitude control fuel, ending its highly successful and history-making mission.

Dawn’s legacy encompasses not only the scientific knowledge gained about the solar system’s early days by exploring Vesta and Ceres, but also includes its engineering accomplishments. The spacecraft’s ion propulsion system operated for 51,385 hours (5.9 years), or for about 54% of its time in space, allowing it to enter orbit around the two largest objects in the asteroid belt.

More specifically, Dawn holds the honor as the first and so far only spacecraft to orbit an asteroid and a dwarf planet, and the first to reach a dwarf planet. The more than 100,000 images and other scientific data Dawn beamed back to Earth of its two distinct targets shed much light on the origins of the solar system.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA


NASA


NASA

NASA's Asteroid-Deflection Spacecraft Captures a Composite Image of the Gas Giant and Its Galilean Moons...

NASA / JHUAPL

DART Tests Autonomous Navigation System Using Jupiter and Europa (News Release)

After capturing images of one of the brightest stars in Earth’s night sky, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test’s (DART) camera recently set its sights on another eye-catching spectacle: Jupiter and its four largest moons.

As NASA’s DART spacecraft cruises toward its highly-anticipated September 26 encounter with the binary asteroid Didymos, the spacecraft’s imager — the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation, or DRACO — has snapped thousands of pictures of stars. The pictures give the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) team leading the mission for NASA the data necessary to support ongoing spacecraft testing and rehearsals in preparation for the spacecraft’s kinetic impact into Dimorphos, the moon of Didymos. As the only instrument on DART, DRACO will capture images of Didymos and Dimorphos; it will also support the spacecraft's autonomous guidance system — the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation (SMART Nav) — to guide DART to impact.

On July 1 and August 2 the mission operations team pointed the DRACO imager to Jupiter to test the SMART Nav system. The team used it to detect and target Jupiter’s moon Europa as it emerged from behind Jupiter, similar to how Dimorphos will visually separate from the larger asteroid Didymos in the hours leading up to impact. While the test obviously didn’t involve DART colliding with Jupiter or its moons, it did give the JHUAPL-led SMART Nav team the chance to assess how well the SMART Nav system performs in flight. Before this Jupiter test, SMART Nav testing was done via simulations on the ground.

The SMART Nav team gained valuable experience from the test, including for how the SMART Nav team views data from the spacecraft. “Every time we do one of these tests, we tweak the displays, make them a little bit better and a little bit more responsive to what we will actually be looking for during the real terminal event,” said Peter Ericksen, SMART Nav software engineer at JHUAPL.

The DART spacecraft is designed to operate fully autonomously during the terminal approach, but the SMART Nav team will be monitoring how objects are tracked in the scene, including their intensities, number of pixels, and how consistently they’re being identified. Corrective action using preplanned contingencies will only be taken if there are significant and mission-threatening deviations from expectations. With Jupiter and its moons, the team had a chance to better understand how the intensities and number of pixels of objects might vary as the targets move across the detector.

The image above—taken when DART was approximately 16 million miles (26 million km) from Earth with Jupiter approximately 435 million miles (700 million km) away from the spacecraft—is a cropped composite of a DRACO image centered on Jupiter taken during one of these SMART Nav tests. Two brightness and contrast stretches, made to optimize Jupiter and its moons, respectively, were combined to form this view. From left to right are Ganymede, Jupiter, Europa, Io and Callisto.

“The Jupiter tests gave us the opportunity for DRACO to image something in our own solar system,” said Carolyn Ernst, DRACO instrument scientist at JHUAPL. “The images look fantastic, and we are excited for what DRACO will reveal about Didymos and Dimorphos in the hours and minutes leading up to impact!”

DRACO is a high-resolution camera inspired by the imager on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft that returned the first close-up images of the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth.

DART was developed and is managed by JHUAPL for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. DART is the world's first planetary defense test mission, intentionally executing a kinetic impact into Dimorphos to slightly change its motion in space. While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth, the DART mission will demonstrate that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a kinetic impact on a relatively small target asteroid, and that this is a viable technique to deflect a genuinely dangerous asteroid, if one were ever discovered. DART will reach its target on September 26, 2022.

Source: NASA.Gov

Hubble's Successor Captures a Photo of An Exoplanet Located 356 Light-Years Away...

NASA / ESA / CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI)

NASA’s Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World (News Release)

For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable.

The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally,” said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who led these observations with a large international collaboration. Webb is an international mission led by NASA in collaboration with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

The exoplanet in Webb’s image, called HIP 65426 b, is about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter, and these observations could help narrow that down even further. It is young as planets go — about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

Astronomers discovered the planet in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and took images of it using short infrared wavelengths of light. Webb’s view, at longer infrared wavelengths, reveals new details that ground-based telescopes would not be able to detect because of the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.

Researchers have been analyzing the data from these observations and are preparing a paper they will submit to journals for peer review. But Webb’s first capture of an exoplanet already hints at future possibilities for studying distant worlds.

Since HIP 65426 b is about 100 times farther from its host star than Earth is from the Sun, it is sufficiently distant from the star that Webb can easily separate the planet from the star in the image.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are both equipped with coronagraphs, which are sets of tiny masks that block out starlight, enabling Webb to take direct images of certain exoplanets like this one. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated to launch later this decade, will demonstrate an even more advanced coronagraph.

“It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star,” Hinkley said.

Taking direct images of exoplanets is challenging because stars are so much brighter than planets. The HIP 65426 b planet is more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star in the near-infrared, and a few thousand times fainter in the mid-infrared.

In each filter image, the planet appears as a slightly differently shaped blob of light. That is because of the particulars of Webb’s optical system and how it translates light through the different optics.

“Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” said Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the analysis of the images. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”

While this is not the first direct image of an exoplanet taken from space – the Hubble Space Telescope has captured direct exoplanet images previously – HIP 65426 b points the way forward for Webb’s exoplanet exploration.

“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” Carter said. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry, and formation. We may even discover previously unknown planets, too.”

– Elizabeth Landau, NASA Headquarters

Source: NASA.Gov

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Why don’t these look like images of our solar system captured by Juno or Cassini? Space is big and exoplanets are small — and far away from us! Don’t forget, we didn’t get our first detailed look at Pluto until 2015 when New Horizons visited. pic.twitter.com/En3zsZa0Wc

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) September 1, 2022

Astrobotic's Moon Lander Successfully Conducts a Communications Test with NASA Relay Stations...

Astrobotic / Keystone Space Collaborative

NASA’s Deep Space Network Ground Testing with Peregrine a Success (Press Release)

Pittsburgh, PA – Last month, the Deep Space Network (DSN) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) successfully completed an end-to-end communications test with Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. These tests demonstrated compatibility with space-to-ground communications that will occur during Peregrine’s mission to the Moon.

After the Peregrine spacecraft separates from United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket, Peregrine will be utilizing DSN’s 34-meter dishes at Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Goldstone, California. These dishes are the same suite used to communicate with the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as historic missions such as New Horizons, Solar Parker Probe, InSight, Juno, and MAVEN.

”Our team has completed a major test with the DSN global network and Astrobotic’s communication systems including flight avionics, ground support software, and mission ops infrastructure. We successfully passed commands, received telemetry, and determined ranging performance. The sense of accomplishment was palpable when the screens of our Mission Control center were illuminated by real telemetry coming from our spacecraft,” said Eduardo Lugo, Astrobotic Lead RF Engineer.

Testing with Peregrine and DSN was conducted over two weeks, culminating in confirmation that Peregrine can successfully transmit data and receive commands through DSN and to Astrobotic’s Mission Control Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“This success marks a major program milestone for Peregrine mission as well as for Astrobotic as a company. Confirming the technical capabilities of our team and our custom-built avionics and communications systems in a sophisticated, system-level spacecraft test was a tremendous success. Seeing the entire team overcome test challenges felt close to flying the actual mission. This is a great accomplishment for our historic trip to the Moon,” says Ander Solorzano, Astrobotic’s Lead Systems Engineer and one of the Flight Directors for Peregrine Mission One.

Peregrine’s progress continues as its Space Robotics team also successfully integrated the OPAL Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) compute hardware and associated camera to Peregrine’s flight decks. TRN is designed to enable precise and safe landings on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The system will be leveraged again on Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One. In addition to TRN, all twenty-four of Peregrine’s payloads have also been integrated with its flight decks.

The Peregrine spacecraft continues its final assembly at Astrobotic’s headquarters and is currently on schedule for final environmental testing before delivery to the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Source: Astrobotic

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Astrobotic

Video of the Day: Looking Ahead to Humanity's Next Journey to Interstellar Space...

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Just thought I'd share a cool video below that was recently posted by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL)...which conducted a study for NASA last year about an Interstellar Probe (IP) mission that could launch to the cosmos as soon as 2036.

New articles such as this one have just been published about IP. One tidbit that remains the same is that the spacecraft would travel at a velocity of 7.2 Astronomical Units (the Earth is 1 Astronomical Unit, or 93 million miles, from the Sun) a year during its journey out of our solar system. Also, this successor to the Pioneer, Voyager and New Horizons robotic probes—as far as JHUAPL is concerned—would ideally depart from Earth aboard a Block 2 variant of the Space Launch System rocket...which will hopefully make its first flight on Artemis 1 later next month.

It will still take at least two years before we find out if NASA gives this historic and intriguing mission the greenlight. The National Academy of Sciences will unveil its next Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey in 2024, with the IP mission one of the projects currently under review by this study.

Here's hoping that within the next fifteen years, humanity will take the next steps of its journey through interstellar space...eventually joining New Horizons in its exploration of the abyss while the twin Voyager probes fall silent for the final time. Carry on.



EDIT (12:13 PM, PDT): Rest In Peace, Bill Russell. The NBA legend—who won 11 championships as a player with the Boston Celtics—passed away today. He was 88.



EDIT #2 (3:53 PM, PDT): Rest In Peace, Nichelle Nichols. Not only did she play Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek TV series, but Nichols was also a prominent space advocate who worked with NASA to inspire other women and people of color to apply to become astronauts. She was 89.


NASA

On This Day in 2021: Our Next Journey to Neptune Was Lost...

It was one year ago today that the Trident project, which would've involved doing another flyby of Neptune and its moon Triton in 2038, was rejected by NASA in favor of two Venus spacecraft (DAVINCI and VERITAS) as its next Discovery-class interplanetary missions.

As you can see, I'm still disappointed by the selections. I've been waiting since late 2005 for NASA to consider another New Horizons-type mission that would venture into the outer Solar System and beyond, and it seems like Trident would've been the last opportunity for this to take place.

A Neptune orbiter mission known as Neptune Odyssey was also in consideration, but will ultimately not fly anytime soon due to it not being recommended for development in the National Academy of Sciences' latest planetary decadal survey about two months ago.

On the plus side, the National Academy of Sciences will release its heliophysics decadal survey in 2024. One mission currently under consideration by that community-driven study is the Interstellar Probe that I've blogged about a few times already.

Just like Neptune Odyssey, the Interstellar Probe—at least the mission concept that was studied by Johns Hopkins University last year—would rely on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to begin its 15-year journey to the heliopause and beyond.

The fact that SLS hasn't flown yet (hopefully that will change after a successful wet dress rehearsal at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida about two weeks from now) is one of the reasons why Neptune Odyssey was not recommended in the last decadal survey.

Once SLS successfully lifts off on Artemis 1 this summer, hopefully that will increase Interstellar Probe's chances of being considered by the National Academy of Sciences for development two years from now.

Vastly different mission objectives aside, a spacecraft that will head directly to interstellar space will definitely make up for a robotic probe that would've flown past an ice giant and its intriguing ocean moon in our Solar System on its way to interstellar space as well! Hopefully the National Academy of Sciences and NASA will see it that way too.




L.M. Prockter et al. LPI / JPL / SwRI


John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

OSIRIS-REx Will Study Asteroid Apophis Up-Close in 2029! And Much More...

Lockheed Martin

NASA Extends Exploration for 8 Planetary Science Missions (News Release)

Following a thorough evaluation, NASA has extended the planetary science missions of eight of its spacecraft due to their scientific productivity and potential to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the solar system and beyond.

The missions – Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover), InSight lander, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, OSIRIS-REx, and New Horizons – have been selected for continuation, assuming their spacecraft remain healthy. Most of the missions will be extended for three years; however, OSIRIS-REx will be continued for nine years in order to reach a new destination, and InSight will be continued until the end of 2022, unless the spacecraft’s electrical power allows for longer operations.

Each extended mission proposal was reviewed by a panel of independent experts drawn from academia, industry, and NASA. In total, more than 50 reviewers evaluated the scientific return of the respective proposals. Two independent review chairs oversaw the process and, based on the panel evaluations, validated that these eight science missions hold substantial potential to continue bringing new discoveries and addressing compelling new science questions.

Beyond providing important programmatic benefit to NASA, several of these missions promise multi-divisional science benefits across NASA’s entire Science Mission Directorate (SMD), including their use as data relays for Mars surface landers and rovers, as well as to support other NASA initiatives such as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS).

“Extended missions provide us with the opportunity to leverage NASA’s large investments in exploration, allowing continued science operations at a cost far lower than developing a new mission,” said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. “Maximizing taxpayer dollars in this way allows missions to obtain valuable new science data, and in some cases, allows NASA to explore new targets with totally new science goals.”

Two of the extended missions, MAVEN and OSIRIS-REx, welcome new principal investigators (PIs).

OSIRIS-APEX (Principal Investigator: Dr. Daniella DellaGiustina, University of Arizona): The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission is currently on its way back to Earth to deliver the samples of asteroid Bennu that it collected in 2020. Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx PI, will remain in place for the primary mission, while DellaGiustina begins her role as the newly-named PI for OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer (OSIRIS-APEX). With a new name to reflect the extended mission’s new goals, the OSIRIS-APEX team will redirect the spacecraft to encounter Apophis, an asteroid roughly 1,200 feet (roughly 370 meters) in diameter that will come within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of Earth in 2029. OSIRIS-APEX will enter orbit around Apophis soon after the asteroid’s Earth flyby, providing an unprecedented close-up look at this S-type asteroid. It plans to study changes in the asteroid caused by its close flyby of Earth and use the spacecraft’s gas thrusters to attempt to dislodge and study the dust and small rocks on and below Apophis’ surface.

MAVEN (Principal Investigator: Dr. Shannon Curry, University of California, Berkeley): The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission plans to study the interaction between Mars’ atmosphere and magnetic field during the upcoming solar maximum. MAVEN’s observations as the Sun’s activity level increases toward the maximum of its 11-year cycle will deepen our understanding of how Mars’ upper atmosphere and magnetic field interact with the Sun.

InSight (Principal Investigator: Dr. Bruce Banerdt, JPL): Since landing on Mars in 2018, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission has operated the only active seismic station beyond Earth. Its seismic monitoring of “marsquakes” has provided constraints on Mars’ interior, formation, and current activity. The extended mission will continue InSight’s seismic and weather monitoring if the spacecraft remains healthy. However, due to dust accumulation on its solar panels, InSight’s electrical power production is low, and the mission is unlikely to continue operations for the duration of its current extended mission unless its solar panels are cleared by a passing ‘dust devil’ in Mars’ atmosphere.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) (Project Scientist: Dr. Noah Petro, GSFC): LRO will continue to study the surface and geology of the Moon. The evolution of LRO’s orbit will allow it to study new regions away from the poles in unprecedented detail, including the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) near the poles where water ice may be found. LRO will also provide important programmatic support for NASA’s efforts to return to the Moon.

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) (Project Scientist: Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, JPL): The Mars Science Laboratory and its Curiosity rover have driven more than 16 miles (27 km) on the surface of Mars, exploring the history of habitability in Gale Crater. In its fourth extended mission, MSL will climb to higher elevations, exploring the critical sulfate-bearing layers which give unique insights into the history of water on Mars.

New Horizons (Principal Investigator: Dr. Alan Stern, SwRI): New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015 and the Kuiper belt object (KBO) Arrokoth in 2019. In its second extended mission, New Horizons will continue to explore the distant solar system out to 63 astronomical units (AU) from Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft can potentially conduct multi-disciplinary observations of relevance to the solar system and NASA’s Heliophysics and Astrophysics Divisions. Additional details regarding New Horizons’ science plan will be provided at a later date.

Mars Odyssey (Project Scientist: Dr. Jeffrey Plaut, JPL): Mars Odyssey’s extended mission will perform new thermal studies of rocks and ice below Mars’ surface, monitor the radiation environment, and continue its long-running climate monitoring campaign. The Odyssey orbiter also continues to provide unique support for real-time data relay from other Mars spacecraft. The length of Odyssey’s extended mission may be limited by the amount of propellant remaining aboard the spacecraft.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) (Project Scientist: Dr. Rich Zurek, JPL): MRO has provided a wealth of data regarding the processes on Mars’ surface. In its sixth extended mission, MRO will study the evolution of Mars’ surface, ices, active geology, and atmosphere and climate. In addition, MRO will continue to provide important data-relay service to other Mars missions. MRO’s CRISM instrument will be shut down entirely, after the loss of its cryocooler has ended the use of one of its two spectrometers.

NASA’s Planetary Science Division currently operates 14 spacecraft across the solar system, has 12 missions in formulation and implementation, and partners with international space agencies on seven others.

Source: NASA.Gov

15 Years Ago Today: New Horizons Flies Past Our Solar System's Largest Jovian World Before Heading Out to Pluto...

It was on February 28, 2007, that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft used Jupiter as a gravity assist on its way to the dwarf planet Pluto—which New Horizons visited on July 14, 2015. This amazing composite image of Jupiter (captured in the infrared on February 28, 2007) and its volcanic moon Io (photographed in visible light on March 1, 2007) was taken by the robotic probe before it spent the next eight years venturing out to Pluto and then the Kuiper Belt region.

It remains to be seen if NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will be able to scope out another Kuiper Belt Object (after Arrokoth, which New Horizons flew past on January 1, 2019) for New Horizons to explore over the coming years...

Happy end of February!


NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Goddard Space Flight Center