A NASA spacecraft’s epic Pluto encounter is officially underway.

NASA’s New Horizons probe today (Jan. 15) began its six-month approach to Pluto, which will culminate with the first-ever close flyby of the dwarf planet on July 14.

“We really are on Pluto’s doorstep,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said last month during a news conference at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. [Photos from NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Probe]

The $700 million New Horizons mission blasted off in January 2006 with the aim of lifting the veil on Pluto. The dwarf planet has remained a mystery since its 1930 discovery because it’s so small and so far away. (On average, Pluto orbits about 40 times farther from the sun than Earth does.)

The piano-size spacecraft rocketed away from Earth at more than 36,000 mph (58,000 km/h), faster than any other probe. It has now covered about 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) during its nine-year journey through deep space.

“In a very real sense, this is the Everest of planetary exploration,” Stern said of New Horizons. “This mission represents the closing of the first era of planetary reconnaissance. We’ve made it to the farthest place, with the fastest spacecraft ever launched.”

via NASA Pluto Probe Begins Science Observations Ahead of Epic Flyby.

The First Light Guides are designed to help anyone with a telescope 60mm and larger to find and observe objects in the night sky. Over the course of the next couple of months, a total of about 70 objects will have their own page, with several videos on each so observers can use a magnified finderscope or a red dot finder. (Setting circles videos will be added in the future.)

This is still somewhat new, and takes a lot of time to edit and get set up, so at the moment there are just a dozen or so objects ready. If you happen across a log in page, that object isn’t ready yet. The ones that are ready are visible in the evening sky. Check out the videos above for more information, or click through to the First Light Guides section, here!

If you’d like to help financially with Eyes on the Sky taking this step forward, please consider a subscription donation at Patreon.com or a one-time donation by using the Paypal buttons below.

Handheld devices users: To navigate Eyes on the Sky more easily, see the Site Map here.

via Eyes On The Sky > Home.

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft heading toward the dwarf planet Ceres.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has entered an approach phase in which it will continue to close in on Ceres, a Texas-sized dwarf planet never before visited by a spacecraft. Dawn launched in 2007 and is scheduled to enter Ceres orbit in March 2015.
Dawn recently emerged from solar conjunction, in which the spacecraft is on the opposite side of the sun, limiting communication with antennas on Earth. Now that Dawn can reliably communicate with Earth again, mission controllers have programmed the maneuvers necessary for the next stage of the rendezvous, which they label the Ceres approach phase. Dawn is currently 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers) from Ceres, approaching it at around 450 miles per hour (725 kilometers per hour).
The spacecraft’s arrival at Ceres will mark the first time that a spacecraft has ever orbited two solar system targets. Dawn previously explored the protoplanet Vesta for 14 months, from 2011 to 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body.
“Ceres is almost a complete mystery to us,” said Christopher Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Ceres, unlike Vesta, has no meteorites linked to it to help reveal its secrets. All we can predict with confidence is that we will be surprised.”
The two planetary bodies are thought to be different in a few important ways. Ceres may have formed later than Vesta, and with a cooler interior. Current evidence suggests that Vesta only retained a small amount of water because it formed earlier, when radioactive material was more abundant, which would have produced more heat. Ceres, in contrast, has a thick ice mantle and may even have an ocean beneath its icy crust.

› Read Complete Story